Best time to raise dragon-slayers is when dragons are everywhere

By David McElroy · March 15, 2022

I overheard two couples talking today about what a terrible time it is to be bringing children into this world.

“The world’s going to hell in a handbasket,” one of the men said. “You can’t do anything about it and your kids are going to end up rotten and screwed up from the drugs and peer pressure on TikTok and stuff. We wouldn’t have had kids if we’d known it would be this bad.”

The others seemed inclined to agree. For a couple of minutes, they talked about the bad influences that had affected their children — teen-agers, it seemed — from schools and social media.

It wasn’t my conversation, so I didn’t interrupt. I agree with them that the world is messed up. Western culture has become horribly dysfunctional, even though most people are too intimidated to be honest about what they see going on. There are deadly problems facing us everywhere — intellectual, cultural, moral, economic and more. These problems are fire-breathing dragons who threaten us all.

But I kept thinking about some words I read the other day:

“Never feel sorry for raising dragon-slayers in a time when there are actual dragons.”

Yes, there are dragons all around us. They’re a danger to you and me. They threaten our values. They threaten our futures. These dragons endanger everything good and decent about what humanity has struggled to build today. They threaten to drag us closer and closer toward evil.

And these dragons threaten our children. If left unchecked, these dragons will program our children to become the dragons of the next generation. The dragons don’t just kill. What they do is worse. They’re more like “vampire dragons.” They poison the minds and hearts of our children — and turn them into creatures who fight against everything good and holy.

But that happens only if we refuse to raise dragon-slayers.

Human beings are born with an instinct to fight for what’s right, but our dysfunctional popular culture numbs our young to that desire. It teaches them to be docile and compliant. It programs them to reject any notion of truth and objective reality. The culture turns them into consumers — people who will do what they’re told and imitate what they see on a screen.

If your children end up “rotten and screwed up from the drugs and peer pressure on TikTok,” it’s because you allow social media and their peers to raise them. It’s because you have given up the decision-making and education of your children to politicians and activists and “experts.”

If you turn your children over to the influence of popular media — whether television or social media or entertainment — they will learn to earnestly believe in things which you know to be nonsense. But they won’t know that.

If you turn the education of your children over to a government-run school establishment, you will end up with children who believe what the dominant culture wants them to believe. Your children will believe they are educated and prepared for the world. They won’t realize how their minds and values have been poisoned.

Why do you do these things? It’s because you’ve been taught to believe this is what good parents do. You’ve been taught that “experts” know how to educate your children — and that you don’t. You’ve been taught that keeping your children away from dangerous media influences is “isolating” them. And you’ve been taught that “public schools” are the bedrock of a positive society.

You believe these things because you grew up exposed to popular culture and government schools and peer pressure — and it didn’t ruin you. So you assume your children will be fine, too.

But if media and schools were already heading in the wrong direction 20 years ago or 40 years ago, they’ve reached a far more dangerous place today. What your children experience — from popular media and from government schools — is not what you experienced.

Politically motivated schools have become dangerous dragons which are often turning your children into creatures you won’t recognize. Media sources are dumbed-down and filled with dangerously evil dragons. Exposing your children to these dragons will very likely destroy them.

If this is the way you want to approach raising children, maybe it’s not a great time to have kids. If you want the culture and the politicians to raise your children, of course you’re likely to be disappointed.

But you can choose to raise dragon-slayers instead.

You can choose to decide what your children learn. You can choose to associate with people whose values reflect truth and decency, to the best of your ability. You can choose what your children are exposed to — until you’ve built their values firmly in a way that they’re likely to oppose dragons.

The notion that you shouldn’t “isolate” your children from media and peer influences is bizarre to me. If your family was exposed to a massive pipe which was spewing raw sewage all over them, would you fret about “isolating them from this sewage” or would you do everything in your power to protect them from the danger?

The world is full of dragons. Until we start raising more dragon-slayers, the dragons are going to keep winning.

Even if you do everything right, it’s possible your children will still turn out wrong. But if you do everything in your power to turn them over to the clutches of evil dragons, don’t be surprised if they become dragons themselves.

You can raise dragon-slayers, but it has to be a conscious choice.

Share on Social Networks

We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

Related Posts