Echoes of the big bang

[jhetley]

The world has changed mightily since I was young . . .

Item in the news, this old guy brought a couple of hand grenades into the local police station, he'd found them in a friend's basement and thought that was a poor choice of storage.  Bomb squad called, building evacuated, etc, etc.  WWII Japanese survivors.  That's the second incident in the last few weeks.

Thing is, I grew up with WWII vets all over the place.  And "war trophies" all over the place.  Friend up the street, his father had a line of artillery shells along the window-sill of his home office, 20mm up to 105.  Nobody thought anything of it.  He'd been in artillery himself, and I'm damned sure in retrospect that every one was deactivated.  Old Mr. Morris was no dummy.

Hell, our elementary school principal used a grenade as a paperweight in his office.  Again, not live.  That one, I know was a practice grenade.

I can just imagine what a riot either case would cause today.

Comments

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Sometimes I'm surprised that the police don't raid the local VFW post.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Maybe they don't dare?

One up the road a bit has their own 105 out front . . .

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

And how many times have I heard you grouse about how much stupider people are these days? Perhaps the officials are concerned about the same thing.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

Oh, the police panic was justified -- in neither recent case was the original collector around, to say whether the grenades were disarmed. And some explosives become much more unstable with age.

It's just a different age. People take fewer risks. You can't buy sulfur, saltpeter, and powdered charcoal at the local drugstore . . .

(Or ammonium nitrate fertilizer at the local hardware or garden store, either.)

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

I have to wonder if people are just less naive than they used to be about how risky some of those risks really are. I've certainly got a couple of "ghodDAMN, I was lucky to get out of that unscathed!" stories in my past, and they don't even involve explosives.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

My parents expected me to acquire some scars in the process of growing up. That seemed to be the parental norm for the time. Now, not so much. We have debates over the best padding to install under playground equipment.

We have warning labels on bicycles.

[quilzas.livejournal.com]

I wonder if how stupider people get relates to how much 'safer' we make things. It could just be a cycle that feeds itself.

[jhetley.livejournal.com]

It's also a "life experience" thing. In the long-ago when I was growing up, a lot of police officers would have handled a grenade before. Would know how to unscrew the fuze assembly and discover the detonator was there or not, the TNT was there or not. And if it was "live", would take it out to an empty pasture and pull the pin and heave it far, far away. No fuss. Livens up a dull day.

I was Signal Corps, most assuredly Rear Echelon, yet I know how to handle and disarm a wide variety of US and foreign (mostly Soviet-type) weapons.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think there is no doubt of it whatsoever. The attempt to eliminate all risk from life is not only futile, it is STUPID. We learn by experience, and without risk there can be no experience of risk. That leads to a generation of decision-makers who have no conception or understanding of risk, and then sooner or later, someone says, "Well, what could possibly go wrong?" And we all know what happens after somebody says that.

We are, for the most part quite unaware, selectively breeding humanity for cowardice, fecklessness, incompetence and dependence; industriously teaching everyone that it's Somebody Else's Problem. Somebody Else will take care of it. Somebody Else will get it done. Somebody Else will fix it. Somebody Else will make it all right.

And then comes the day when Something Bad happens, and everyone is looking around for Somebody Else to fix it, and all they can see is everyone else looking back at them with their own frightened, bewildered, lost, helpless eyes.