We give a lot of crap to Millennials for being precious little snowflakes, but the truth is they did not start the trend. Most of the Baby Boomers were equally fragile, as are most of Generation X. There were just a larger percentage of exceptions with the Baby Boomers, smaller with Gen X and now tiny with Millennials. Americans born after World War Two have had a pretty easy life and have been treated as such precious little snowflakes; then a relatively small number went to fight in Vietnam, a smaller number in Iraq the first time, and an even smaller number in the Global War on Terrorism.
We have to melt these snowflakes. When you add friction to a snowflake it turns to water, the most versatile and powerful substance on earth. Water can take any form, bends to the touch but can carve out the Grand Canyon or power entire cities. Snowflakes are delicate little one off crystals of pointlessness; but you apply some friction and they can literally move mountains.
Which brings me to this blog's unusual topic: internal strength. I teach an external skill. I teach people how to interact with a threat in a physical manner. That's an outward manifestation of power, work, effort and physics. But somebody said something to me this week that made me want to write about the internal mechanisms required to execute the skills I teach. Not the philosophical internal skills, which I spend a decent amount of time teaching in my classes, like the legal and moral idea that your life and body are sovereign and you have the moral right to defend them. Rather, I am talking about the conviction necessary to manifest physical violence upon a person trying to do violence to you or a loved one, which takes strength.
I was told, "Not everybody has your background in the military, so you can't talk to them in certain ways. It is counterproductive to influencing them." This bothers me, not because I don't like dancing around on eggshells to protect the emotional sensitivity of weakling snowflakes (which I don't), but more importantly it bothers me because it indicates a level of fragility that detracts from my mission of making Americans invulnerable. We cannot be invulnerable physically if we are cripplingly fragile and vulnerable internally. I know the 1960s and 1970s brainwashed an entire generation into believing the sensitive man is the truest nature of human existence, but that is complete crap. We did not claw our way to the top of the food chain by being sensitive. The children of these brainwashed kinder and gentler souls are even more fragile and vulnerable to psychological damage than they were. So much so that when somebody is blunt or direct with them in disagreement, they consider it the equivalent of a physical attack. As I have written before, I don't know at what point they stopped teaching "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but your words are just patterns of auditory vibrations in compression waves of air, surrounding us at all times and thus completely incapable of causing me physical damage," or something like that. Apparently things changed after I left kindergarten.
Somebody recently argued with me that, "words have power." This is also untrue. Words do not have power, they have influence at best. Bullets have power. Allow me to prove this to you: The Revolutionary War without Thomas Jefferson would still have been won by George Washington, though not in as poetic and charming of a manner, to be sure. By contrast, without George Washington's Army, Jefferson would have died very badly in an English dungeon for an act of treason; a very poetic and charming act of treason, to be sure, but dead nonetheless. Anybody who has ever been in a life or death situation understands the difference between influence and power; nobody talks their way out of a firefight. But, this does not mean that you can only come to know the difference through combat. It is far better to know the difference before you ever go to combat. Last week I wrote about growing horns and being a harder sheep to kill. The same is true of your internal reserves; you have to harden them against negative influence, recognizing it is not the same as threatening power, which can actually hurt you. Actions matter; words and the exchange of ideas are luxuries. They are wonderful luxuries that enrich our lives, but they are not what makes life bearable or death available. Anybody who thinks that words are the root of either of those states of being has truly lived a charmed and privileged life shielded from actual consequence, violence or snowflake-melting FRICTION.
Jokes, folks, are just folking jokes. If your feelings get easily hurt, train to make your internal self as resilient as your physical skills make your external self. Go hurt some peoples' feelings and get your feelings hurt; the latter being more important. Go sit in the front row of a comedy club wearing something ridiculous and see what happens. Whatever happens, I positively guarantee, you will walk out with all of your limbs, all of your senses and no extra holes in you (as long as the club isn't in Chicago). It will also give you a thicker skin and a stronger internal reservoir for dealing with actual challenges and hardships.
This is why we politically incorrect veterans often come across as not just mean and uncaring to the precious little snowflakes, but also arrogant. Combat makes that distinction between what is influence and what is power. It makes the distinction between what makes life bearable, and what makes life luxurious. Once you learn that you can live without the luxury of "high fallutin' talkin'" and everybody kissing up to each other in the giant drum circle of modern America, you become stronger. You also become wiser, which makes nineteen and twenty year old combat vets a lot smarter than many forty and fifty year old snowflakes. The greying snowflakes don't like that because it hurts their feelings. Maybe, snowflakes, if you want to be as powerful as water, you should listen to those who have survived the Friction!
Thanks,
Soule (Easy 6)
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