Slate magazine reports on this Sunday’s NYT magazine cover piece in which the writer is embedded in Iraq. It notes the harrowing challenges our soldiers face:
There soldiers must "play killer, cultural anthropologist, hearts-and-minds winner and then killer again" among an ambivalent-at-best populace while fighting a mostly homegrown insurgency that uses civilians as shields. The company’s 26-year-old captain confides, "I’ve got too many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people," saying he "wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage."
`he “wished he could buy 20 goats and let the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage.”`
That’s something I find interesting. As human beings we are expected to think and act logically. The problem is given a particularly stressful situation or collection of events logic goes out the window and we act more instinctually and emotionally.
I would be really interested to see if more socially acceptible(*) and widely available ways of releasing a build up of stress would have on improving the general state of society, replacing other common outlets like being a prick, racism, beating up on wife/kids, crime etc.
The problem is, does this diminish someone’s stress, or build up a greater desire to release it in bigger and more destructive ways?
* – not killing or injuring other living beings, this includes animals.