ROPES' CORNER

When we were children, back in the 1950s, we teased our parents about growing up in the Dark Ages. The Great Depression and World War II were as remote to us as the Battle of Hastings and the Black Death. Well, the wheel has turned full circle now, and it's our kids' turn to chuckle, to ask us what life was like before the discovery of fire. We accept this as being in the natural order of things; their day will come.

Every generation has its own peaks and valleys, its own challenges. To a degree, it's true that history tends to repeat itself. But life also has a habit of increasing the pressure, of raising the stakes. Our wars become increasingly more violent, our weapons more lethal, our diseases more virulent, our social ills more varied and difficult to cure.

And how do we respond? Our history books would have us believe that we put up a united front and vanquish our demons using the power and nobility of the human spirit. Bull puckey. We win because we are lucky enough to have a small group of smart and dedicated people in the right place at the right time. The rest of us are perfectly content to let those people fight our battles for us. We somehow manage to put our heads in the sand while keeping our feet firmly planted in the air. We seek distractions. The really big issues are too much for us, so we look for escapes. We find small threats where none really exist, because it's in our nature to be victorious warriors, and we worry at them like a puppy with a rawhide chew toy.

We've come up with a few examples of the kinds of things that people actually consider serious and important today. These are all verifiable through the news media, and prove beyond doubt that cultural craziness is far stranger than fiction. Besides – you simply couldn't make these up.

• In Canton, Ohio, a 6 year-old boy who jumped from his bathtub and ran to a window to stop a school bus was suspended by his school for sexual harassment. He had a doctor's appointment and couldn't attend school that morning. But when his sister told him she saw the bus coming, he ran to the window and shouted for the driver to wait. Since he was nude at the time, the school ruled that he had harassed youngsters on the bus.
• Seth Shaw, a counselor at a public elementary school in Fort Worth, Texas, said "Hello, good-looking," to a new female employee. Big mistake. She was the instructor of the school's sexual harassment workshops. Shaw was suspended without pay for twenty days.
• A tiger was the emblem of the Thomas Lake Elementary School in Minnesota. Officials decided their tiger was too mean and violent-looking, so they asked the students to pick a new symbol from a list that included a sweet-looking tiger and some school supplies. The students voted for the latter – a pen, a pencil, and a ruler.
• Young women in Sweden, Germany and Australia have a new cause: They want men to sit down while urinating. This demand comes partly from concerns about hygiene – avoiding the splash factor – but, as Jasper Gerard wrote in the English Spectator, "more crucially because a man standing up to urinate is deemed to be triumphing in his masculinity and, by extension, degrading women." One argument is that if women can't do it then men shouldn't either. Another is that standing up while relieving oneself is "a nasty macho gesture," suggestive of male violence. A feminist group at Stockholm University is campaigning to remove all urinals from campus, and one Swedish elementary school has already done so.
• The British Labor government authorized a pamphlet urging teachers to ban the children's game of musical chairs on the grounds that it promotes aggression and allows the biggest and strongest children to win. Sue Finch, the booklet's author, said: "Musical statues is better because everybody wins."
• The federation of meat-shop owners in France is offended that reporters refer to murderers as "butchers," since most butchers are "gentle, peace-loving" workers. And an architect in New York complained about a news report identifying "the architect" of a shooting spree. "There it is," wrote columnist Clyde Haberman of the New York Times, "the ugly face of anti- architect bigotry."
• Because it begins with the masculine-sounding syllable "his," the word "history" has been banned at Stockport College in Manchester, England. There's been no word yet on what to do about that offensive first syllable in "Manchester." And a government-run employment bureau in Walsall, England, banned the words "hard-working," "reliable," and "smart" on grounds that they discriminate against the disabled.