“An animal caught in a trap will gnaw off its own leg to escape. What will you do?” – Dune
I read the first four novels, but I found them a bit dry. (All memes as found)
I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
– Frank Herbert, Dune
In 2025, fear is not just a personal demon. Fear is now a cultural plague, especially for the kids.
We have raised a generation terrified of their own shadows, and it shows in every therapy session, pill bottle, riot, and Antifa® meeting.
The number of kids in therapy or pumped full of psychoactive drugs by the quacks who call themselves psychologists seems to be 8 or 9 out of 10. In perspective, this is the era of civilization that has the greatest level of material wealth in history, and the lowest hunger rate in the world.
World hunger?
It’s a solved problem outside of war and intentional starvation for political reasons.
The drugs and therapy are not making the kids better. At all. The way society is treating kids is like prescribing a hammer to the knees for a headache. The good news is the pain from the hammer will distract you from the headache, but eventually you’ll only be able to walk in circles.
The Mrs. asked me to have a talk with our kids on drugs. I said, “Sure, but I don’t think I’ll make much sense when I’m high.”
And no, these drugs are not good for you like whiskey, whisky, wine or beer. That’s a joke, but if therapy worked as well as a couple of brews after a long day, Antifa® wouldn’t exist.
Kids today are not allowed to figure anything out on their own. Failure? That is a dirty word, banished like fiscal responsibility is banished from Congress. As a proud Gen X kid, my family left me alone for the entire weekend when I was in third grade. No note, no nanny, no neighbor looking in on me from time to time. Nope. Just a key and a fridge full of questionable leftovers. I survived on frozen pizzas and three channels (no one counted PBS®), but I learned to entertain myself without burning the house down.
Barely.
When Paul wanted the last glass of water, he called Muad’Dibs on it.
By eighth grade, Ma and Pa Wilder upped the ante. They drove off to Florida.
For a month, leaving me to fend for myself. I even dealt with a thumb wound that probably should have had stitches from when I was using very poor form to whittle.
Did I call for help? No.
I fixed it with duct tape, determination, and a healthy glop of Neosporin™.
That is what you do when the stakes are low and the lessons are free.
High school? That is when freedom hit near-adult levels. I had my own apartment over an hour from Wilder Mountain (long story). I managed my own schedule, and got home whenever I damn well pleased since Pa Wilder visited only three nights a week (Sunday, Monday, and Wednesday) and he left all the fun nights for me.
Some people call me the space cowboy. I wish they would stop. My name is John.
Sometimes I was home just after practice. Sometimes, I was home at 3am after doing, well, other things. No curfew, no check-ins, just me against the world.
Was I unusual in having my (mostly) own place? Sure.
But the freedom? That was standard issue for Gen X. Even before I could drive, I would bolt out the door at sunrise and not return until the streetlights flickered on. No helicopter parents hovering like drones, tracking every move with an app or scheduling athletic events. Nope.
Contrast that with the childhood scripted for kids today.
It is structured from dawn to dusk, every moment scheduled like a corporate meeting. Playdates? Organized by committee. Sports? Leagues with participation trophies for showing up. Even recess is micromanaged, with rubberized playgrounds that cushion every tumble. And do not get me started on the deprivation of schoolyard fights and bullying, which back in the day were ritualized tests of mettle to place yourself in the hierarchy.
Places to test yourself. Like the Olympics®.
Freshman initiation in high school was a rite of passage, not a crime. Upperclassmen would haze the newbies with pranks: carrying books, silly chants, maybe a wedgie or two. No gross abuse, just enough strain to test character to see how you’d take it.
If you performed well under pressure?
Instant respect.
Fold like a cheap suit? Okay, it was tougher. They had to learn resilience the hard way. And fights?
They happened.
Teachers often let them play out just as long as they had to go as long as no real damage was being done. A bloody nose or a black eye, then it was over. Often, the combatants were friends afterwards, hierarchy established, testosterone balanced, respect earned: male bonding at its rawest.
Paul wrote a book on walking to avoid sandworms. It was a step-by-step guide.
These rituals, in moderation, built toughness. They taught that pain passes, conflicts resolve, and life demands honor. Bruises faded, but the lessons stuck. Parents? They never heard about it. A fistfight? So what? Boys will be boys.
Today? Heaven forbid a scuffle breaks out in a school (at least a middle-class white majority school). It is not a learning moment; it is a federal case. Suspension, counseling, parental conferences, maybe even charges. Zero tolerance turns into zero growth, however, since kids are shielded from every scrape, every failure, every real consequence.
The world they inherit is virtual, endless screens feeding dopamine hits without risk. Social media wars replace playground brawls, but the scars are deeper: anxiety, isolation, fear of the unknown. Many of these kids have never cold approached a woman and asked for a date.
Part of the point is learning to fail when the stakes are low. A lost fight in fifth grade? Big deal, you dust off and try again. A botched initiation? You toughen up for next time. She said, “No, you’re not my type, I prefer men with two eyebrows?” Fine. There are more girls.
I mean, if Soros can get a date . . .
These situations, however, build the muscle to handle adult life without crumbling. Fear becomes a tool, not a tyrant. But cloister kids too long, and they enter the world paralyzed. The Mrs. nailed it when we were talking yesterday: ” . . . if they (kids) cannot handle solving teenage problems, they will commit atrocities as adults.”
I liked that line so much I made her text it to me.
He also needs some smokes and a pepperoni. I know at least one person found this hilarious.
Unresolved fears fester into rage, leading kids to lash out at a world they never learned to navigate.
Look around at the twisted landscape of 2025:
- Riots over nothing,
- Entitlement epidemics,
- Adults throwing tantrums like toddlers.
Weakness is a result raising children in bubbles. No free-range exploration, no unsupervised adventures, no low-stakes failures to forge resilience and enough scar tissue to toughen the kid up. Instead, society offers them therapy and pills paper over the cracks and pay for the therapist’s BMW® payment.
The solution is simple.
Face the fear, let it pass, emerge stronger. Let kids roam, fight, fail, and fix their own messes. Strip away the structure, the screens, the safety nets. Teach them that bruises heal, but cowardice cripples. Otherwise, we breed a nation of mind-killed adults, obliterated by the little-deaths of unchecked terror who will do anything because they have faith in absolutely nothing.
One way or another, courage will return, if not because we shatter the bubble, it will because it collapses under the weight of fear. And then?
We’ll have to face our fears.
As boomer children, our hypocritical Silent Gen fathers lectured us on the evils of marijuana, with a Pabst in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Mom was no better with her amphetamine “diet pills”. What did they know about pot? Well, Reefer Madness told them the whole story, right?
So drugging is nothing new, only the kids today seem largely uninterested in alcohol, the one that has been ‘socially acceptable’ for most of human history. But the THC in their vapes and gummies is on a whole ‘nother level compared to the Playskool pot I smoked by the bale in my youth. As far as the SSRIs and benzos handed out (legally) to the kids now like Tic Tacs, that sh!t is on a par with what we used to refer to as “professional” drugs back in the day. Heroin. Angel Dust. Crystal meth.
It’s no wonder that the kids aren’t alright. We don’t let them try and fail and try again. It is considered safer somehow to keep them contained indoors, sedated by pharma and distracted by highly addictive digital escapism. Safer, or perhaps less inconvenient for their Boomer and Gen X parents, also over-mediated and wholly consumed by their own trivial pursuits.
If our rules led us to where we are, we need to change our rules.
I was the one, amigo! However, the fear issue pandoras box is not closing. The only thing imho that will bring back sanity is war.
Heh! Glad I wasn’t alone! Yup, and it’s looming.
I can certainly relate to this post from my own childhood. Today? WWBPD (What Would Brittany Patterson Do)!
https://abcnews.go.com/US/georgia-moms-arrest-puts-free-range-parenting-back/story?id=116004039
We ran free and barefoot back in the 1960s in Jackson, MS. Only wore shoes if we wanted to buy a cherry Coke at the luncheon bar in the Rexall. Rode our bikes 5 miles to the Pearl River when I was 13 and camped out on a sandbar. Armed to protect against alligators. Yes, had a .22 strapped around my back all the way. Wind-up alarm clock set for sentry duty.
And this was in a North GA County that probably voted 75% for Trump? Its County Seat, Blue Ridge, is a small tourist trap that I did lots of work in and around. Not a bad place at all, but a**hole cops it seems. Never interacted with them, however.
Interestingly, north of BR in that county there’s a town on the TN line, McCaysville. You see billboards for “McCaysville Drugs & Guns”. No joke. Get your Prozac & S&W .38, female citizen. One stop shopping.
And south of BR in the bordering county on US 76/Appalachian Parkway, there’s a Bigfoot Museum. $9 admission these days, used to be $5. F’ing Biden inflation.
That is scary.
In the Fifties and early Sixties, when I grew up, society generally was run by men. Now, it is run by women with men as figureheads. Comfortable and pliable figureheads. The dregs of masculinity left over after 50 years of Total Feminism.
America was a different world 60 years ago. So much for Equality between male and female. Women demand it and get it, to the ruin of all. Scripture says the husband is the head of the wife, as Christ is the head of the male. Equality is the doctrine of the enemy.
When I was twelve or thirteen my dad got my brother and I together. Said his supervision was over and we were on our own, don’t get arrested or girls pregnant. If you want to drink, drink in the house.
They’d lock him up for abuse and neglect nowadays.
They would.
“…. if therapy worked as well as a couple of brews ….”
Funny (both peculiar & ha-ha), but today’s cartoon of Pearls Before Swine, has the same theme. Goat is extolling to Rat the virtues of therapy to solve Rat’s problems and how the cost of therapy has come down. Rat points out that the beer he is drinking is only $5. “Drinking – the cost-efficient solution.”
So John, your vision of the rewards of ethyl alcohol is not alone in the Universe. And there’s even an economic justification for doing so.
Indeed: booze, the solution to and cause of all of life’s problems!
Hey man, you’re Dune a good job!
Thank you!
You really had me with Philomena “Cunc on Dunc” but I laughed hard enough at Quiznos Hat Rack to get the “what are you laughing at?” look.
Ha! Yeah, that one tickled me a lot as well. The world needs more Rickyisms.
Ten years ago or so, family psychologist John Rosemond wrote about how in the 1960s, American parents began looking to mental health professionals for child-rearing advice. Since then, an exponential per-capita increase in child mental health professionals has matched a dramatic deterioration in child mental health.
You know, kinda like Americans wanting free stuff from our govt and the decline in the value of the dollar since the 1970s.
Go figure.
But the National Parks still have their signs “Do not feed the animals” because they will become dependent on the handouts and won’t be able to fend for themselves.
We’ve really crippled multiple generations . . .
The Fifties saw a vast ad-propaganda campaign to convince women to feed their infants ‘formula’ (artificial shit) instead of the breast. With predictable disastrouos results for many.
Looking back, it obviously doubled as an early Independence Move by the Endlessly Independing American Female. Same way they were sold cigarettes in the Forties and Fifties are empowering them to be equal (in cancer deaths) with men.
How about we compromise on “Maurice” (Whoooo-wooo!)? Or all the way to “Mr. Wilder, sir” if you’ll just give us an authoritative explanation of that whole “pompatus of love” thing? Yeah, I looked it up, but I don’t buy what I read. I know you can give us something a lot more convincing.
I would like to read books about Harry Pompatus.
Miller just thought pompatus was a cool word.
“The solution is simple.
Face the fear, let it pass, emerge stronger. Let kids roam, fight, fail, and fix their own messes. Strip away the structure, the screens, the safety nets. Teach them that bruises heal, but cowardice cripples. Otherwise, we breed a nation of mind-killed adults, obliterated by the little-deaths of unchecked terror who will do anything because they have faith in absolutely nothing.”
Not gonna happen.
So instead, we’re going to eventually have no choice but to eradicate an entire generation, and let the one after that, the one that sees what the alternative would have been, gets to pick up the pieces after the generational hiccup of wiping out a swath of society out of sheer unbridled necessity.
It won’t be pretty, but it will be epic. And nearly inevitable.
No one will miss Generation Whine, and most of the rest of society will view its demise the way Boba Fett’s minions laughed and cheered the antics of the hapless Gamorrean guard in the rancor pit.
The Jews have waged an all out war on the youth, empowering niggers as proxy warriors to murder white kids, because niggers don’t have the forethought to understand consequences. Meanwhile White parents have been race-guilted into taking the abuse.
This plus the flood of illegals making cities unsafe for kids.
It was Texas 1999 when we moved out of our 1950s neighborhood because the “Mexicans” were rampant, harassing kid, walking into unlocked houses, exposing themselves to women and children, doing drive by shootings in the neighborhood.
What was a quiet safe community became ethnically cleansed because it was no longer a safe place to raise kids.
Add electronic devices, and childhood is ruined.
Oh, it will, because you can’t avoid the consequences of ignoring reality.
*waves hand* Me, I was the one that cracked up about the Ricky meme and sent it to all my friends, whom have mostly never even seen TPB or Dune
Explaining TPB is just so difficult without sounding insane.