>From Fred On Everything
The Marine Corps and Psychotherapy

Tell you what, I've had it with whiners.  Further, if I hear the phrase
"self-esteem" again, I'm going to kill something.  It'll happen.  Just
wait.

Some New Age, psychotherapeutically babbling little parsnip is going to
gurgle to me about how arduous his life is, when he probably doesn't
have a life to begin with, and about how it's somebody else's fault, probably
mine, and his self-esteem is all bruised and rancid and has warts on it.  And
I'm going to stuff him into a concrete mixer.

No, wait.  I've got a better idea. I'll pack him off instead to Marine
Corps boot camp at Parris Island, in the festering mosquito swamps of South
Carolina. I spent a summer there long ago, in a philosophy battalion.
All  battalions at PI are philosophy battalions.

The chief philosopher was named Sergeant Cobb, and he was rough as one.
His  philosophy was that at oh-dark-thirty we should leap up like
spring-loaded  jackrabbits when he threw the lid of a GI can down the squad bay.  Then,
he  figured, we should spend the day at a dead run, except when we were
learning such socially useful behavior as shooting someone at five hundred yards.

He didn't care whether we wanted to do these things.  He didn't care
whether  we could do them.  We were going to do them.  And we did. The drill
instructors had a sideline in therapy.  They did attitude adjustment. If the
urge to whine overcame any of us, Sergeant Cobb took his attitude tool-it was
a size-twelve boot on the end of his right leg-and made the necessary
adjustments.  It was wonderful therapy.  It put us in touch with our
feelings.  We felt like not whining any more.

I kid about it, but it really was philosophy.  We learned that there are
things you have to do.  We learned that we could generally do them.  We
also learned, if we didn't already know, that whimpering is humiliating. The
Marine view of life, which would eradicate American politics in about
three seconds if widely applied, was simple: Solve your problems, live with
them, or have the grace to shut up about them.

Can you imagine what this would do to the talk-show racket?  Fat
housewife to Oprah: "My...I just won't...being so...heavy hurts my self-esteem."
Oprah: "So stop sniveling and eat less.  Next." The Corps believed in personal
responsibility.  If your life had turned to a landfill, it might be somebody
else's fault.  Maybe existence had dropped the green weeny on your plate.  It
happens.  But the odds were that you had contributed to your own problems.
Anyway, everybody gets a raw deal sometime.  Life isn't a honeymoon in
the Catskills.  Deal with it.

I remember a coffee mug in an armored company's day room: "To err is
human, to forgive, divine. Neither of which is Marine Corps policy."  There's
something to be said for it. Nowadays everybody's a self-absorbed
victim, and self-respect and strength of character have become symptoms of emotional
insufficiency.  Oh, alas, alack, sniffle, eeek, squeak, the world's picking
on me because I'm black, brown, ethnic, fat, female, funny-looking,
dysfunctional, datfunctional, don't use deodorant, or can't get dates.
And sensitive?  Dear god.  If people suffer the tiniest slight, they call for a
support group and three lawyers. (Support groups.  When I'm dictator, we'll
use'm for bowling pins.)

Whatever happened to grown-ups?  It's incredible the things people whinny
about.  Go to the self-pity  section of your bookstore.  It's usually called  "Self Help."
You'll find books called things like, "The Agony of Hangnails:
A Survivor's Guide."  They will explain coping strategies, and assure you
that you are still a good person, shredding digits and all. Other books will
tell you that because you had an unhappy childhood (who didn't?) you are now
an abused, pallid, squashed little larva, and no end pathetic. Other books  will
tell you how not to be toxic to your Inner Child.  (I'm writing a book  now:
"Dropping Your  Inner Child Down A Well.")  We'd be better off if most
people's inner children were orphans.  I once sat in on somebody else's
group-therapy session, which was concerned about the morbid condition of
the patients' self-esteem.  I didn't understand the rules of therapy, and
said  approximately, "Look, maybe if you folks stopped feeling sorry for
yourselves and got a life, things might be better."  I thought I was contributing
an insight, but it turned out  to be the wrong answer.  The therapist, an earnest
lady-all therapists seem  to be earnest ladies-told me firmly, and with much
disappointment in me, that  this was No Laughing Matter.  The patients'
self-esteems were undergoing cardiopulmonary resuscitation, and I was
suggesting that they get a life instead of picking at their psychic scabs. She
reckoned I was pretty terrible.

Stuff'em into a concrete mixer, I say.

Copyright Fred Reed