It is time to teach our children to fight back!

I don't know what it was like in those classrooms at Virginia Tech. Perhaps there was no opportunity to jump the shooter and put a stop to the slaughter. Perhaps the victims were frozen in shock, unable to act (I suspect that might have been my reaction.) But our society is getting meaner. Yes, mass killings are rare, but they are always a possibility (especially when our media gives so much coverage to a killer like the one at VT - copycats see their opportunity for immortality.) More common are average assaults, where more often than it used to be, the assailant just kills the victim, even if he or she cooperates. Our children need to know it is ok to fight back.

This is a hard read in light of what has happened this week, but we parents need to hear it:

A Culture of Passivity

"Protecting" our "children" at Virginia Tech.

By Mark Steyn

I haven’t weighed in yet on Virginia Tech — mainly because, in a saner world, it would not be the kind of incident one needed to have a partisan opinion on. But I was giving a couple of speeches in Minnesota yesterday and I was asked about it and found myself more and more disturbed by the tone of the coverage. I’m not sure I’m ready to go the full Derb but I think he’s closer to the reality of the situation than most. On Monday night, Geraldo was all over Fox News saying we have to accept that, in this horrible world we live in, our “children” need to be “protected.”

Point one: They’re not “children.” The students at Virginia Tech were grown women and — if you’ll forgive the expression — men. They would be regarded as adults by any other society in the history of our planet. Granted, we live in a selectively infantilized culture where twentysomethings are “children” if they’re serving in the Third Infantry Division in Ramadi but grown-ups making rational choices if they drop to the broadloom in President Clinton’s Oval Office. Nonetheless, it’s deeply damaging to portray fit fully formed adults as children who need to be protected. We should be raising them to understand that there will be moments in life when you need to protect yourself — and, in a “horrible” world, there may come moments when you have to choose between protecting yourself or others. It is a poor reflection on us that, in those first critical seconds where one has to make a decision, only an elderly Holocaust survivor, Professor Librescu, understood instinctively the obligation to act.

Click on the title to read the rest...if you can.

---Katie