Are we a nation of weaklings? (Emotional and mental.)

Great Debates
1

Have we turned into a nation of wussys?
Or are we over reacting?

When the Challenger disaster happened, among the expected sadness, I was stunned to find therapists rushing to the children of the deceased teacher. The I was stunned to find therapy for students being offered afterwards in the schools for kids affected by it.

September 11 was a devastating day but I was several thousand miles away from New York City and had no one that I know involved in the disaster. I was concerned, saddened and then outraged. Normal emotions. You expect them. Now I see spots on TV telling the nation to go get help if they cannot handle the disaster, that people are there to talk to them to help them through it.

I am stunned.

When Pearl Harbor happened, the nation was shocked, saddened, stunned and horrified, then enraged and the people bucked up, girded their loins and plunged into war manufacturing with a zeal and desire for revenge never matched since nor seen before.

The Korean war was terrible, but the Nation did not run to shrinks to understand why and through Vietnam the citizens did not flee to the psychiatrists couch to better understand the ruthless killing.

Then come spots telling us how to get our children help because of 9/11 and how to ‘get them through the grieving process’ and my jaw drops in astonishment.

I was in 6th grade when Kennedy was shot. When the announcement arrived and school was closed, us kids were mostly pleased to be getting a day off. We had no real idea why the teacher was crying and why the principal was so grim. Many of us figured we should be pleased because our folks voted for the opposition and were against Kennedy as we had so often heard. We expected our folks to be pleased, and most of us were surprised and confused to find them crying. We had not grasped the concept of national unity in those early years. We were more concerned for our folks unhappiness than that the President had been shot.

We knew and loved our folks. We had never met Kennedy. Through the influence of our folks we learned that a very bad thing had happened and reacted according to their feelings.

None of us were sent to therapists, few of us, when school reopened, went around in depression because of the assassination, but we were aware of how the adults around us signified that something terrible had happened and responded to their grief. There were no counselors set up to discuss our feelings and non one that I know of went batty because of the incident.

Years later, we in higher grades were aware of Vietnam, thanks to the news media and the fact that every other TV program was either a WW2 movie made in the 50s showing our heroic men stomping the Evil Nazis, Japs or whoever was the flavor of the day, or else movies about our guys doing heroic things in the jungles of Vietnam and winning. (Back then, reality based, graphic movies and pictures were not done.) We were more aware and concerned with the draft which awaited us after stepping out of high school, because you could be guaranteed of getting a pre-induction notice within a few weeks of becoming free of 12 years of school. After the pre-induction, you would then sweat out the draft and see if your number came up and if it did, then you got to go to the hell called Military Boot Camp, mainly the Army, where you had no freedom nor say in anything, and after boot camp, you would go to Vietnam to be shot at.

THAT bothered us more than anything else.

If they wanted to consol anyone, they should have had shrinks awaiting when happy-go-lucky teens, wet behind the ears, got those damn life shattering ‘Greetings’ from Uncle Sam in the mail where he said he WANTED YOU. Then, life as you knew it was about to end.

Are we really so weak as a nation that we need shrinks to help us through a national crisis or are we being pushed into thinking we are weak by people who think they are doing good by suggesting we get psychiatric help after such a disaster?

Or, have we had it so damn good since Vietnam, Korea and WW2 that we actually do crumble under pressure and need shrinks? Vietnam was nasty. It took the glory out of war, confused the hell out of people, wrecked our confidence in our government, and left us with shattered ex-soldiers behaving in strange ways, something one never heard of in past wars except in rare incidents.

Back then, almost every family had a father, mother or brother which had served in a war or in the military. My own father served in WW2, my Mother talked about rationing and war industries, my aunts and uncles worked in war businesses, one uncle had served, one aunt had served and my brother had enlisted during Vietnam to avoid the draft. The TV of the 50s and 60s was full of war movies and war kits were popular toys sold in toy stores.

Every kid had toy guns and army soldiers, toy fighter jets and toy battleships.

Is it that we have spawned a generation in the last 30 years that, since they have not gone to war, never had to be a civilian under war footing, grew up learning to sue the pants off of anyone who even brushed against them, in an era where anyone wanting a gun is possibly bad, and Cowboys and Indian games are politically incorrect and even the descendants of slaves are suing for compensation, that we have lost the intestinal fortitude which got us through the last two major wars?

I mean, today in many cases, distressed animals get more expensive care than distressed humans, smoking cars are offensive, conspicuous consumption is normal, everyone has more civil rights than they need, kids can press charges over school yard fights and then the shrinks have to see the combatants, while ecologists run around keeping you from using land you already own because a single rare mouse nests on your property and smokers are Evil People to be ridiculed while drug users are Cool.

Parents spanking kids go to jail, lawyers give kids more rights than adults, we’ve let teacher authority in schools become third rate, and we pass kids who should have been held back several grades because of statistics and buy cars that cost more than a two bedroom house did in 1956.

Are we becoming a nation of wussies? If so, do we need to be blooded to get tough or stop folks from telling us we need shrinks every time something upsets us?

2

I think you are overstating the situation greatly. No one said that if people didn’t get psychiatric help after 9/11 our country would crumple. There is simply more of an awareness today that people can be traumatized by events halfway across the country or the world. But this trauma for most people is short-term in nature, and going to some sort of counseling is not necessarily needed. However, if you can get psychiatric help to speed the process along, then why not? If you get a head-ache don’t you take an aspirin? It’s the same basic principle for most people.

Also we are now aware that some people will be greatly traumatized, and although they make up a tiny percentage of the population as a whole, why not point them in a direction to get the necessary help? Since we can’t know in advance exactly who will need help and who won’t, the easiest thing to do is tell everybody, and then let the individual decide. That is the reason why you are seeing all the announcements for mental help everywhere, not because we are a nation of wussies.

I also detect a bit of the “this generation can’t handle what mine could” argument, and in response I would like to point out that Socrates noted that people said the same thing when he was growing up and so did Bertrand Russell, a philosophizer who died in 1970. Both of them made note of how when they were growing up the previous generation was highly critical of the younger generations, and now that their generation was older many people in their cohort were critical of their upcoming young. It seems to me that if every generation in history was right that newer generations were incapable of handling the same problems that they did, then we would have long since devolved past the stone age and all of us would currently be lying on the ground in the fetal position, drooling.

I don’t think that every person going to a shrink is weak. They may be doing what is appropriate for them and that would strike me as being smart.

3

I don’t think we’re a nation of wussies, we’re just recovering from the shock of having our fantasy that we’re invulnerable and not isolated from the rest of the world and its problems shattered. And we will recover from that shock. WWI, WWII and the Korean War were awful too, and the soldiers who came back were traumatized by war because war is traumatizing. The Vietnam War, Kennedy getting assasinated, gosh, whatever all else you mentioned are traumatic events as well. I think it’s human nature to want stability, and America, being a relatively young country compared to other countries, has gotten used to stability. It’s just our time to get shaken up. We’re not used to terrorist attacks on our soil or having to deal with mass epidemics and high mortality rates from disease, malnutrition, blah, blah, blah. We’re used to being in a relatively open society, and now we’re seeing that that might change.

I think the problem is that although we have a lot of information at our fingertips via the Internet and the media, Americans are still very much misinformed because we’ve isolated ourselves into a cultural vacuum, and we don’t think critically enough about the stuff the media feeds us. We’ve accepted the allusion that we’re safe, somehow invincible, we’re different from the rest of the world and somehow exempt from dealing with the problems other countries have been dealing with for a long time. Terrorism is nothing new to other countries. Disease and hunger are nothing new to them either. What happened on 9/11 was just our time to wake up and join the rest of the world.

I think the problem is the media. They just get on my nerves with their goddamn sensationlist reporting of events. We don’t need to know in advance what our military’s tactical plans are because if the media’s blabbing all our business, then all the enemy needs to do is turn on a radio, tv, or read a paper to know how to prepare to defend themselves and possibly defeat us. We don’t need to hear of every fucking outbreak of Anthrax, but rather we need clear information on how to detect the disease and then seek out the proper treatment. We don’t need to know how small Anthrax needs to be in order for it to infect someone, and we sure as hell don’t need to know what’s the best way to sneak it into this country or how exactly to distribute it so that it can kill the maximum amount of folks. The media is doing more harm than good spreading around all this information that’s just creating mass panic in folks.

I think that if people need to get counseling, then fine. They should do it, but I think also that we just need to relax a little and go about the business of living the best way we know how. Certainly be aware of your surroundings, trust your instincts if you see or hear of things that are out of the ordinary, but if we run around panicking, then what kind of life is that?

4

Methinks you need to look up the history of “shell shock”. It’s been around a lot longer than Vietnam. Come back when you understand what it is like to lose a family member to suicide, and then I will listen when you call me a wuss for taking steps to ensure that my loved ones don’t know that pain.

5

Why not seek a better understanding through psychology of the particular pain we are in? Of course people didn’t do that 60 years ago and so what? They were hurt too, they just didn’t have psychologists to go to. It has nothing to do with weakness. Before there was Tamiflu (a registered trademark) we just endured the flu. Now we get a prescription and get over the flu earlier. That doesn’t make us weak. Seeing a shrink does not mean you are weak, it just means you are going to get better sooner. Not seeing a shrink doesn’t mean you aren’t mentally ill either, it just means that if you are, you aren’t going to get better and you are going to be a pain in the ass (at best) to those around you.

Tojo and Hitler (against the advice of their wiser advisers) thought we were soft and weak. When OBL gets to hell, he can get together with them and compare notes on just how weak we are. And I might add that Tojo and Hitler (and even Mussolini) were a lot scarier than OBL.

6

Let’s look at two statements:

and…

So, and correct me if I am wrong, you were not yet born when Pearl Harbor was attacked. That means that you do not know how Americans reacted, apart from what you may have read in books or seen in movies.

Could it be that the people in 1941 were just as scared as they are now, percentage-wise?

And, really, what is wrong with therapy? Why is it wrong to get help to work through tough times? Isn’t that what therapy is for?

7

Man! Interesting comments here. All of them and with good thought put into each. Lets see how I can address them.

Noted. And with good reason such things were said because, with advancing technology and social reforms, like making it a law that you couldn’t just slay anyone who pissed you off anymore, society did grow weaker in certain areas. Like, people prior to medical painkillers accepted a whole lot of pain in their lives and they grew up with it. They functioned often with injuries that would today send a person to bed screaming for morphine and looked upon others who could not tolerate pain as being weaker. A whole lot of arguments back then were settled with fist fights because battering each other senseless was a normal thing. They did not sue each other over the agony of a broken jaw or arm. This ‘toughness’ was reflected in their entire lifestyles for men, women and children.

Even later on, say like in the 1930s or the 1940s, people had a toughness to them. Firemen used to charge into burning houses, even after the people had fled, to throw out furniture and goods because they knew they would not be able to save the house, but peoples possessions were their lives, often hand made and passed down through generations. People face tragedies more stoically. A higher mortality rate among newborns meant that the death of an infant was a sad thing, but their opinion was ‘hey, it happens’. Sorry. Have another one later. Big families got used to having family members die off on the homestead before they reached maturity.

Later on, parents beat the crap out of their kids up until they left home as adults because they had the right to do so, often using devices like belts, paddles and sticks. beating a kid with a cane until welts arose on his back and bottom was normal. These kids grew used to the pain and severe punishment. Later, when they started working, they got used to the hardships and heavy labor of their jobs and the bull attitudes of their bosses.

I’m not saying this is all good, it just was and people were tougher because of it. When we went into WW1, folks enlisted to ‘get into a good scrap.’ In Europe, sometimes families would have a picnic while watching a battle from a safe distance. When WW2 hit, people were more ready to fight, to give the ‘Jerries and Japs’ and ‘whuppin’ and more ready to go through the hardships of basic training and then the hell of war itself.

But then, they did not have the several hundred or so new luxuries that we have today to make life easier. Even their cars were uncomfortable and dangerous, often having a crank start that could whip back and break your arm. One car channeled hot exhaust into the cab as heat – which not only burned the boots of the passengers but damn near killed them. (Luckily those cars were not real weather proof nor air tight.) No seat belts and nasty, crimp rimmed tires that were a pain to change.

I agree with being annoyed by the media and feel that they have far too much knowledge of our troop movements. They need to put in some strict controls like they did in dessert storm, where the media was kept pretty much in the dark. However, with the great availability of ‘if you need help, then call this number or go see …’ commercials, it gives us the appearance of being weaklings.

I don’t think they did that in England when Princess Diane died. No one was telling the grieving English to go see their shrinks if they were upset over the passing of their most favorite Royal. Come to think of it, no one did it over the war in the Falklands either. Any Israelis being told to go see shrinks because of feeling bad about being at war for about 100 years? Are the Northern Irish suggesting their combative citizens go see shrinks about hostile feelings or depression coming from fighting each other for around 50 years?

Only Americans. (Gad! Europeans must love that.)

When I was a kid, if an adult spotted two boys beating each other into bloody bits and stopped the fight, that was fine. Today, if he does so, one or both Dads will show up, wanting to beat his ass for touching their kids, wanting to slap a lawsuit on him for laying a hand on their kids or calling the cops to have him arrested for assault for grabbing their kids to physically pull them apart. (Don’t laugh. It has happened!)

even sven

Ummmm, I’m not real sure what you are getting at here. I know of shell shock. read all about it. I assume that you lost a family member due to Vietnam shell shock. I’m sorry, but that is not what I’m talking about. Vietnam was a strange war and what makes it worse is that those who promoted it got away scott free while everyone else suffered.

True but I heard about it from my folks, who were around then and my father enlisted. I also heard from them, and numerous aunts and uncles, how life was before, during and immediately after the war. Like I heard about handing clothing down, swapping home grown vegetables, canned, for a dressed out pig from a neighbor, one set of new shoes a year, limits on buying smokes and how nonsmokers would get cigarette ration cards and trade them to smokers for food or gas ration stamps.

See, when I grew up we had no video games or PCs. It was a rare kid who stayed inside most of the time and we were out playing, running, climbing, wrestling, riding bikes and generally, on the average, we were lean and healthy. It was a real rare thing to see a pallid kid with a beer gut wandering around, but it is common place today. We grew up playing war games, so when real wars hit, we were more prepared for it.

I find kids like 12 and 13 running around late at night now and when I was young, the streets rolled up at 9:00 and no kids were out. No all night stores. The cops would investigate if they found a couple of kids out past 10:00 without adults around. Now, I have heard kids talk about going to bed when they please, griping because nothing good was on TV at 2 am in their rooms (we had no TVs in our rooms), or how they talked via Internet until 3. When I was a kid, it was in bed at a certain time. No excuses. Up at a certain time, and no excuses, unless you were really sick.

Discipline. Less luxuries to get used to. My big sneaking deal of the time was to read under my blankets with a flashlight. I was excited and thrilled when I was allowed to stay up past midnight on a weekend because I was older. (I watched Creature Feature, when it came in, off of antenna B&W TV.)

So, I look at all that we have now, read about and watch documentaries about how obesity is a nationwide epidemic with close to 40% of the population rapidly becoming tubs of lard, notice the litigious nature everyone seems to have these days, and then the TV, after a national disaster, starts cooing and suggesting that people go see shrinks to get over it and I think ‘wussies’! Whatever happened to the tough Americans that fought WW2 and kept peace in the world for years afterwards?

Maybe we have got it too good.

I live today with gobs of luxuries and things that are average that I never dreamed of having as a child. Military surplus walkie-talkies were a dream to possess back then (big suckers)! and now almost everyone has cellular phones which are far beyond them. I never dreamed of having a watch that is also a computer, nor a laser in a pen! The lasers I could buy came from Edmund Scientific Catalogue, cost nearly a grand and were BIG! and complex and could not be shoved in your pocket. Carried under the arm maybe, but not in a pocket.

I can even buy cut up chicken parts! Margarine comes in flavors! Jell-O in cups! My grocer carries vegetables that I only read about in books about foreign countries! I never dreamed of a VCR let alone a DVD!! Who knew a massive set of encyclopedias could fit on a small, silvery disc? A small device for global positioning was never even imagined and real time maps in cars was never even thought of! (You had to be double jointed to fold a good gas station map while driving in a car.) Not only is there instant coffee, but flavored coffees, decaffeinated coffees and coffee that tastes like it came out of one of those beat-nick steaming, hissing wild looking machines that weighed about a ton. Bikes come with several speeds instead of 1. I sleep on, of all things, a water bed and a HEATED one at that with a REMOTE CONTROL for my COLOR TV.

Not to mention a word processing program that actually checks my spelling and corrects the mistakes without me having to get a dictionary! Magical!

Things are so much easier today. Perhaps too easy?

8

Nah. This is just the ranting of a bitter old man.

Every generation has criticized the one that followed it. It seems to be human nature to project one’s own decline onto the society at large.

There was a tablet from Sumeria, circa 2,000 B.C.E., which decried the declining morals of the youth of the day. Similar rants can be found in every culture, at every time. Ours is no different.

The fact is that people work harder, and more efficiently today than they ever have. We watch less TV than people did 20 years ago, and more people are fit than they were 20 years ago.

So, no, your assessment of today’s generation is completely off-base. It is just a different time.

9

And back in the 50’s if you got polio, you took it like a man, in an iron lung if need be. None of this pansy vaccination crap.

10

J248974 wrote, in the OP:

Or are we over reacting?

11

I’m afaid so.

Would you believe that many intelligent people spend inordinate amounts of their valuable time just posting to sill web sites? :o

12

themoon wrote:

Hmmm … I’ve heard this same story said about an ancient Roman tablet, and an inscription on a piece of pottery circa 2800 B.C.E… Is there some place I can look up, definitively, where this tablet/inscription actually came from and what it actually said?

13

[RANT ON]
It’s the liberal media thats turned us into a bunch of wussies! For years theyve been complaining about the violence on TV, videogames, and movies. They’ve been pushing all this ‘talking about your feelings’ and settling problems without using violence’ crap. Well what am I supposed to do when terrorists armed with Anthrax and box cutters take over my airplane? Debate the ramifications of post-industrial Western cultural expansion on Islam? Fuck no! I need to be able to go Passenger 57 on their ass! How can our children know how to do that if the only movies on TV star Julia Roberts?

And what ever happened to dehumanizing your enemy? For centuries it has always been America fighting the Redcoats, Krauts, Japs, Gooks, and Ruskies. Now wars are all PC. To make thigs worse, the media only seems to report the news whenever we hit civilians by accident. What about all the civilians we didn’t kill? I know that we aren’t at war with the Afghan people, but I get the feeling that those guys with the AKs and the pickup trucks are not going to be waving flags in Kabul like the French welcoming Pattons Third Army.

And finally, what is the deal with all the ‘We Will Overcome’ banners? What are we, a bunch off battered housewives?

[/RANT OFF]

14

I disagree with J248974 and with msmith537. It isn’t new laws and comfort, and it isn’t the liberal media. Its toilets! We were all WAY tougher when we used pails and buckets, washed them out, and set them back into the house (or hovel, or whatever) to be used later. That was the beginning of the end.
[rant off]

liberal media sheeeeeeesh is it their fault i lost so much money in the market last year too? and why i woke up with a cold this morning?

15

I don’t know if it is provable, but I think it is true. Basically, there was a lot more suffering and hardship back in those days, so people took it more in stride. In our times, people have a greater sense of expectation that bad things won’t happen to them, so they are more affected when they do happen. It’s not America, its the whole Western world.

The unfortunate downside of having it so good.

16

Of course, these days, it’s the conservatives complaining about violence on TV, videogames, and movies, so I guess it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other, huh?

17

For what it’s worth, I’m 19, and I happen to agree pretty much fully with this ‘bitter old man’

I have nothing really to compare it to, but our modern society is absolutely PATHETIC in it’s irrationality regarding these sorts of things.

Do you have any idea how many people I’ve seen saying “Well, you know, I don’t really feel safe flying anymore…”? Do you know how much willpower it takes for me not to punch them right in the face for that?

Are we such absolute morons and cowards that we let a one time, statistically insignificant event scare us from doing something again?

And after Colombine, we had mom’s saying “I don’t really feel safe sending my kids to school anymore…”

I want to execute each and every last one of them as a last-ditch attempt to save this god forsaken country.

We’ve all been programmed by society to respond to hardship now by medicating ourselves into a dazed state. Broke a nail? You must have gotten a stress disorder from it. Take some happy pills! Tell a shrink why mommy never loved you!

A bunch of people died 1500 miles away from you? Take some happy pills! See a shrink! Grieve!

I’m proud to say that I haven’t even considered changing my life in any way because some terrorists happened to attack New York. Tragic as it might be, I find the concept of suddenly being scared of [insert the fear of the week here] absolutely silly. I find anyone who reacts that way absolutely disgusting.

We’ve discarded concepts of self reliance and personal responsibility as, apparently, old fashioned. In a nearly pavlovian sense, we respond to hardship by immeadiately relying on others. The government, shrinks, happy pills, whatever. We don’t bother to try to solve our problems by ourselves. We don’t take responsibility for our actions - “I murdered that girl because mommy didn’t breast feed me and now I have emotional issues.” “Well then, you’re free to go! have a cookie!”

I seriously doubt previous generations suffered from widespread problems as these. Once upon a time, self reliance and personal responsibilities weren’t silly outdated concepts. I seriously think this generation has been ‘programmed’ to respond significantly different than previous ones. To always rely on someone else to fix your problems. To always take the easy way out of anything. To always capitalize on any moral ambiguity to justify your own immorality. I’m not ranting from the perspective of a bitter old man, but of someone who has to live amongst this disgusting trend in society.

18

Ok, J and SenorBeef, what the hell have you done? Have either of you joined the military? Have either of you volunteered to actually do anything to help anybody? Or do you get your own little feeling of personal accomplishment by not caring about the deaths of over 5,000 people.

Here’s what I do: I run cross country and do triathlons. If you can actually run an 18:12 5K or run half marathons without stopping, AFTER a mile swim and 56 mile bike ride, raise your hand. Right now I am taking four AP classes, and getting A’s in all of them except one B. SenorBeef, if you did this, raise your hand. Most of all, I spend 60-150 hours a month in search and rescue. We teach an EMT-B standard of care, and we spend 12 straight hours in the field, without breaks, searching for lost, injured, or suicidal people. I have seen more bodies, and had to see or directly deal with the reactions of more family members than I have ever cared to. If you have ever actually carried out a 250 lb. man over five miles of rough terrain, raise your hand. If you have ever actually seen a body in the place that they died (funerals don’t count), raise your hand. If you have ever had to tell a 73 year old woman that her husband of over fifty years is dead, raise your hand.

I’m not going over this list to say that I’m any tougher, or can do more than any generation that came before me. I’m here to say that in all of these situations, it has helped to have someone to talk to. Talk with paramedic firefighters that have been in the business since when the attitude of, “if you cannot handle the heat, then stay out of the kitchen,” prevailed. They will tell you that firefighters were still affected by what they saw. They didn’t talk about it, but it came out in other ways. Many left the fire department, or hurt themselves, or felt anger towards others to the point that they wanted, “to execute each and every last one of,” those who expresses themselves after some sort of tragedy.

On September 11th, the ones who I saw laughing at this tragedy were not the healthy, well adjusted people. It was the social outcasts, the “nerds”, making jokes and saying that this was actually a good thing.

19

First, what’s up with this idea that seeing a “shrink” is somehow a sign of weakness? I suppose we’d all be better people if we never talked about anything other than strong, manly things like football, beer, and the WWF?

The reason why I have been to a psychologist is because most of my friends are too wrappped up with the same concept of machoism and “suck it up” attitude you’re espousing that they don’t want (or don’t have the ability having never practiced, even if they wish they could) to talk about something as “wussy” as emotions.

Here’s a statement with no cite, but perhaps it is the very things you seem to value from your own upbringing, J248974, that have lead to the current state of affairs as you know them. We are all responsible for shaping our world, and the fact that your attitudes do not reflect the most visible aspects of our society only shows that they are unsustainable in their current form.

SenorBeef

:rolleyes:
Please. You say you doubt previous generations suffered from “widespread problems” such as these? I highly doubt we suffer from such “widespread problems.” I believe in message board lingo we call that a straw man? Correct me if I’m wrong.

Again, please. While I do give some allowances for hyperbole in the pit, this is just extreme and doesn’t say anything. A person going to a psychologist for a broken nail is just rediculous. There are some things that people actually do go to a psychologist for that you must disagree with. What are they? In the meantime I suggest you not be so angry with the people seeing shrinks for hangnails, 'cause those people don’t actually exist.

Ok, there’s something wrong with grief when it comes to thousands of folks being killed in an act of maliscious violence and hatred? I can understand if you are not grieving, things don’t affect everyone the same way, but are you not able to understand how this event might be worth of grief from those whom are moved to feel it?

And again, what’s with the " ‘shrinks’ are for wussies" attitude. Give it up people.

20

whoops!..

this is not the pit…

this is Great Debates.

Um, sorry if any of my post was a bit inappropriate for the forum, I opened it quite a while ago and after reading other people’s posts it just seemed like it was in the pit. A slip on my part, and I appologize.

But… in that case, I’d like to ask both J248974 and SenorBeef to take their vague and inflamitory rantings somewhere else, and to perhaps post some actual and factual information as opposed to the hyperbolic and derisitory comments that have so far formed the core of this “great debate.”