Greetings all. In a recent right angle (Big Tech Workers Collude with Hamas Supporters to End Cloud Contracts with Israel – YouTube) Bill says “the reason liberals don’t care that Palestine started the fights is because they never played with children outside.” I disagree with this statement, at least in the absolute nature that Bill presents it in, because as a millennial that was exposed to a lot of the same kind of upbringings these people were subjected to, I can say that there are plenty of other reasons for why millennials don’t think “who started it” matters.
- Zero Tolerance School Discipline. We’ve all heard the stories; Billy was getting bullied by Timmy, after months of torture Billy decides to fight back one day, this happens to be the day that a teacher or other adult sees the fight, and then both students are suspended. It doesn’t matter that Timmy has been violating the rules for months and this was the first time Billy even swung his fist (this is to say, “Timmy started it”), “fighting is against school rules and anyone caught fighting is in trouble because fighting is wrong.” While I personally was never subjected to this lack of justice (the time I beat up my bully I did it when only my friends were around), I witnessed this happen first hand multiple times.
- “I don’t care who started it, your bickering and fighting is driving me crazy so both of you are in trouble” parenting. I don’t think this is so much a fault of modern parenting styles, I’m sure Adam and Eve probably experienced some of this with Cain and Able, and it’s even more complicated when the siblings point to each other and say in unison “he started it, did not” and most problems are just minor accidents being escalated until fists are flying. I don’t envy parents that walk into a room and have to pry 2 fighting children off each other, and neither child will accept blame because neither child realized their action caused the other child to be upset (“I mean, that was my brother and I a lot, and I know I was never to blame for starting it,” and my brother would probably say the exact same thing), and this happens so often that you’re just doing a punishment that is for all the other times that the fighting happened and you didn’t really do anything. However, it still sends the message of “who started it doesn’t matter,” which breeds this kind of thinking.
- “Just ignore your little brother, he can’t actually hurt you.” I think it was Trevor Noah that said this recently in regards to why Israel was wrong for defending itself, and this is probably the worst of them all, because this isn’t a lesson of “fighting is wrong regardless of offensive or defensive” that has the excuse of “I don’t know who started it,” but a lesson of “the presumed weaker party is permitted to fight and the presumed stronger party is not permitted to do anything accept stand and take it” and in my experience is started in plain view of the parent without any repercussion for the younger sibling. This actually happened to me a lot with my younger cousin (who is an only child) and my grandparents; he would walk up to me, start annoying me right in front of my grandparents, I would push back, and then I would get in trouble and the worst he would get is being called a baby. I remember my grandpa saying to me “don’t let the bAABies annoy you, do you want to be a bAAbY too?” I remember telling him “if it means I get to fight back, then yes, because there are no benefits to being a big kid” (it’s not like I got to stay up later, or eat special foods, or anything like that, so there really was no benefit to being a “big kid” aside from praise, and since my grandparents praised everything we did that didn’t have a lot of worth). I wonder how many liberals were younger siblings that got off scot free with all sorts of mischief because they were younger, and how many of them now believe that Israel shouldn’t fight back “because that’s not how it’s supposed to work.” I also wonder how many are like Trever Noah that think Israel shouldn’t fight back “because I was never allowed to fight back against my weaker adversary, I had to be the bigger person.”
So there is my analysis of why my generation doesn’t think “who started it” matters. I know when I’m a parent I’ll do my best to instill “who started it is important” in my children, because it is important. Yeah, there’s definitely an “only child, isn’t properly socialized by having disagreements with other kids” element, but even when children are socialized with other children, there generally isn’t additional guilt assigned to the child who started it.