Concerned people in the social media wring their hands over all those home-grown jihadis scheming and plotting to sneak over to join ISIS or any of those other primitive militant groups currently butchering each other in the Gulf states.
This isn't just testosterone-fuelled young a-holes looking to make some kind of a quick and easy mark on this world. There's also all those young women trying to sneak off to join a society where they might be raped, enslaved and sold like cattle among the weapons-toting jihadis making war on practically everything that moves.
While people all over the civilized world view all this on 50" flat-panel high definition screens in climate-controlled homes or tune in events on the stereo in their high tech cars, their kids scheme to get away from it all and put their lives on the line for someone else's lunatic-fringe cause.
Illogical? Sure, but as usual, there's a reason. It is almost certain they are looking for alternatives to their secure, predictable, unchallenging, parents-sponsored lifestyle which they interpret as dull and uneventful.
Simply put, it's possible these kids don't know that they are secure and comfortable. Comfortable compared to what?
And therein lies the problem.
All of the participants in WWII learned what war was. The ones who did not directly participate in the bombings and killings scanned the casualty lists daily, read the headlines and watched the action on the newsreels at the local theatre. We learned to live with the uncertainty, the food shortages, the rationing, strictly regulated war time economy and the lifestyle changes it necessitated.
When the last battles were fought and peace declared, everybody knew what they had to do to achieve a peaceful, predictable society and went ahead and did it.
My generation is probably the last one that lived in a severe war time economy in North America. We knew what war was, and unless you have this knowledge, you cannot know what peace is. The current generations can bandy about terms like War and Peace without having any practical insight into those conditions.
And that's what's happening in the chaotic end of our social spectrum right now. We have several generations out there whose members cannot know peace simply because they do not know war. It's been too long since the last great global slugfest.
That is why they go looking for it among the rejects in unevolved societies.
It ought to be easy to conclude that the problem with these kids is that our social consciousness needs another solid infusion of perspective.
