Disciplining for survival
It’s different when a college coach waves his finger at you and says “Son, you need to be disciplined,” and when your grandmother waves a switch at you and says, “Son, you need to be disciplined.”
Or is it?
When I was in high school, joining the military seemed a safe option. We had left Vietnam and we certainly weren’t going to Russia or anywhere else that we could imagine. In a peacetime like that, a drill instructor may seem cruel or harsh, because he’s forcing his troops to do things they won’t have to do later. If America never enters another ground war, American soldiers aren’t really going to need to know how to run across a field without getting shot.
But in wartime, a drill instructor doesn’t seem so harsh. If he doesn’t teach his troops to how to run fast, when they will soon need to know how to do that, that isn’t compassion. It’s not compassion, knowing that our children’s character faults could kill them, not to take radical measures to repair them.
What do you think?
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