For Better or For Worse by Lynn Johnston for August 25, 2013

it`s all fun and games until the the bullets fly

I remember when I was little, I was the only girl in my neighborhood so I hung around the little boys my age. I turned into a tomboy and didn’t realize it until a new girl showed up and I threw a “water grenade” at her. She hated me until we graduated elementary school and she moved away

It’s only fun until someone shoots you and you can’t get up. There are no “do-overs” in a real war. People kill each other, and they die for real. It’s not a game, and it’s anything but fun when somebody’s shooting back with real bullets or that RPG comes screaming in.

That’s really sad. It may be “fun” to play with toys but those “toys” are killing machines. So, if you’re lucky you get to kill some one else. If you’re not, well… Either way it is hardly fun.

Unfortunately, it is in the interests of the politicians, military and industry to promote the “fun” illusion.

yes Mike – in the grown up army you really do get to kill people if you go to war. A military for defense of one’s country is always needed – but war is not and killing is always a last sad resort. Many soldiers find when the time comes that coping with having actually killed another human being an awful thing to live with. War is not fun – but it is an increasingly frequent sad occurence

War is grisly, horrifying in real life, andnever fun. The horror. The death. Andutter devastation. It never leaves. You do not forget.

I don’t remember playing at ‘war’ or ‘cowboys and indians’. We just ‘explored’ or went on ‘bike hikes’. Then there was walking or riding our bikes downtown to the movies.

@ Night- Gaunt49

All that said, many years ago, parents had very little extra money to buy toys that would keep kids entertained for hours.I was fortunate that my dad sold toys wholesale to stores and could afford the odd treat for us six kids. Nevertheless, we played cowboys and Indians for hours. Our games could involve dozens of young kids on our block. I was raised in Hull, Quebec, and at that time, everyone had large families. We had such a good times. My own kids never did get involved in such endeavors growing up. It seems that street- size games went out of fashion and by then, many families on many streets, valued their privacy more than their kids possible friendships.

Times were more innocent for kids then, too. No one realized the words they were saying were considered inappropriate or hurtful. IMHO, words became considered hurtful because someone decided they were hurtful and made such an issue of their opinion that, in time, the injured parties (our First Nations) also came to consider them hurtful. By shaming our kids, we also shamed the FN into thinking they had been deliberately shamed. In actuality, no one was dishonouring the FN, at all. Kids were simply acting out the roles that were outlined in their history books and books such as Davy Crockett.

Also, there were really very very very few children who were First Nations in our neighbourhood. Adults, in general, were the discriminating people, never the kids. Later, though, they were influenced by their parents and followed their rules to avoid ‘such people’.

The first panel brought back a memory. I was about 10 years old. I had heard that the house next-door-to-across-the-street had a new family with an only child: a girl my age. One Saturday morning I got my friend Taffy (of course it was a nickname), who was kind of shy and VERY sheltered by her mother, to meet this new girl. I went to the back door and was about to knock when I decided to look in the door’s window. The family was up, cooking breakfast…entirely nude. All 3 of them. Knowing that Taffy would be shocked insensible, I told her that maybe we should come back later, without saying why. (Incidentally, we did, and we and Maria all became good friends.)

It was inevitable that young kids played ‘war’. The scope of the concept of ‘war’ meant that lots of children on the neighbourhood could play together and get along terrifically. War was all that was heard on the radio and the fledgling TV for a lot of years. One only needed a cool branch from a tree to be able to pretend to have a weapon. It was all about imagination.

Kids never seriously thought of dying during their games. It was always pretend dying. Many kids lost their fathers during the war. But they, themselves, were invincible. To make it seem evil to play a pretend war was , in a sense, robbing kids of a piece of their childhood. If you had told kids in Texas that Davy Crockett was fictional or a criminal because he killed others …some of whom probably were First Nations, they would have grown up not honouring one of their true heroes. The sad thing, too, is that many Canadians were true heroes in WW 1&2, and kids today probably don’t know even one or two of them. That is a grave dishonour to our lost soldiers. We should know many of them as well as those First Nations who also gave their lives.

Totally agree, Susan. Your comment made me detour to “Doonesbury” — thank you.

In this day and age and all that is going on in the world, I found this strip today to be very inappropriate. I know little boys and girls love to play war, but seriously, this isn’t fun and games any more!

Odd that the juvenile crime rate was so much lower before it was politically incorrect to allow children to play “soldiers” or “cops and robbers.” Take away their childhood guns, and suddenly the desire to employ them – as teens – grows.

night gaunt, do you have a link to some of your cartoons?

Ride in a tank? I used to drive an M577A1 command post carrier (a “track”). We spent a lot of time in the motor pool, and most of it (like 90%) was drudgery.

My generation (baby boomers) grew up with TV shows, movies, comic books, et cetera et ceteray, that showed war as anything from dramatic to comical. When we’d ask our fathers and uncles, “was it fun to be in the war?” and they’d reply “No, it was terrible” we couldn’t jibe that with the things we were seeing.“Was it exciting?” “No, it was terrible.”" Was it adventurous?" “No, it was terrible.”And we couldn’t grasp what they were telling us after having seen so much of “Twelve o’Clock High,” “Combat!” and “McHale’s Navy.” Yet we came to understand better as we got older. And we didn’t go around shooting schools or doing other horrible misdeeds.

I don’t like this one.

Yeah, but it’s not as much fun!

For fun and games is good. But with the last two panels, the boys should go over to “Doonesbury” and visit with BD and toggle today and get their view of real life war. They might reconsider.

Do what Mike did now, in a school yard, and you get suspended or expelled.

But kids today are not allowed to play this way. We used to play all of the games: cops and robbers, cowboys and Indians, and of course, War. But today’s parents are under the illusion that play guns and play violence is the cause of crime and violence.

I know a man that though it was fun to shot and kill. He liked talking about “mowing down” people with a machine gun like it was something fun to do. He did not find it fun anymore when an IED turned his friend into red paste. It was like until that day he did not really understand the meaning of war. Last I heard is he seeing a shrink. I tried to tell him it was not like he though it was going to be.

Spanish families are still marked by the tragedy of the Civil War, 1936-1939 … decidedly not fun. Not fun here, nor fun anywhere …

when does school start for him?

We had a lot of kids in our neighborhood. Battles took place all the time! Dirt clods for hand grenades. Forts, walkie talkies! Great memories! But, back then parents were parents & you knew your limits!

Cool its not….Soldiers are NOT lucky to get killed in the line of Action. Nor are the Law Enforcement officers of the US.

Yeah, yeah, war’s all fun and games…until somebody gets shot.

In Canada, where this strip was made, guns are not common in households, particularly in urban centres. Yet, as children, we all played war and Cowboys and Indians, using wooden guns (or something resembling guns). Kids from farm communities often had access to rifles, used to hunt animals, usually in the fall months, and for putting down ill or injured animals on the farmstead. I suspect few of those farm kids equated the guns at home with the ones used in wars.Sam Clemens (Mark Twain) portrayed children in the mid-South (as I would describe Missouri in the 1800s) in terms that don’t sound that different from those in this strip. Are today’s children all that different, and is it because of the immediacy of the world events in our lives? If so, we may be the poorer for it, but the genie is out of the bottle, and we can’t go back to those days. Or maybe we older folk are just relating our youth to a changed world and today’s generation is coping with their reality, and the world isn’t really collapsing in on itself.

And, you’re probably an NRA member, too!!!!!

IT’S JUST A COMIC, PEOPLE!!!!

I spent the first four years of WWII in Pittsburgh. I recall having some war toys, including a group of little lead soldiers. As I recall, they might have been wearing WWI doughboy helmets. At any rate, after a hard day’s fighting, one Sunday evening they were tucked into their beds by a guest from my dad’s office, and me. The middle-aged man and I were down on the bedroom floor (with my parents nearby) using a suitable tiny cover – don’t remember what we used for pillows.

Just remembered that I saved my allowance for a month to buy a little stuffed felt paratrooper with an attached parachute and a backpack full of bb-sized candies. The candies soon disappeared, but I had lots of fun throwing the paratrooper up at the ceiling, over and over.

I must have played some war games with some of the other kids in the neighborhood, but that’s all the war stuff I can recall in Pittsburgh. Guess most of the boys remembered different adventures.

Remember these strips are almost 30 years old, and that this year a young child in the U.S. was disciplined for chewing a cookie into a gun shape. As noted in many of the nostalgic comments, the basics have changed – sometimes for the better, but too often for the worse.

I was there, that’s how it was. I had a friend who had a long piece of leather, that was a horse to her. I had a toy rifle when I was 5, and a cowboy gun soon after. It was all games.They punishments are silly, when a kid with a cookie or a banana says pow, and gets sent home for 3 days.Another scary one is what I read about a 6 YO boy kissed a 6YO girl, and it was called sexual harassment. Back then it was cute, or if a boy pulled your braids… Back then it was a little boys way of “liking” and even if a girl ran to the teacher and “tattle” on him, she wasn’t mad.

I would hate to take what were innocent games back then to expose them to reality too early. This was millions of peoples good childhood memories. We Knew we weren’t really killing our friends, we all got up and said “missed me”Truly now we know that war is wrong, the USA doesn’t do enough to help damaged vets, Soldiers coming home from the hell of VietNam were called “baby-killers” and back then we had the draft. So many of the youth din’t want to go in the 1st place. I was friends with a VietNam vet, and I had pet rats, He never came over because they gave him nightmares. He would also get flashbacks (not caused by my rats), but of things that were so far worse.

I played with guns and I haven’t either. And I’m proud to be a liberal. The Democrats are wrong in this.

I had a great nephew who loved guns as a kid. Then he grew up and committed suicide with a gun. Different people react differently!

Just come on over to the US and you can “play this for real” right now.

I too played with guns when I was a kid, but somehow we knew it was PLAY and that we should never do the real thing. My parents never owned a real gun and neither do I.

The problem is not now, nor has it ever been, children “acting out” their natural competitiveness in “war-like” games that rarely resulted in fights and maiming each other; usually when they did, the combatants were best of friends shortly after. The problem comes from adults who have forgotten the lessons learned when they were children and presume to ascribe their own adult fears. prejudices, and motivations onto the actions of the kids.

Wasn’t there a strip in 2001 where Michael enlisted in the Army after 9/11 put everyone on high alert?

I was recently in the Seattle area for a wedding and had some free time to read “For Better or For Worse” in your comics section this past Sunday, August 25th 2013. As I read it, it seemed to be a normal cartoon about playing cops and robbers or Army with fake guns, a normal activity when I was a child in the late 50s early 60’s. As I went from one picture to the other I was surprised that in this day and age they were showing kids with toy guns something that would have been common in the 50’s,60’s 70, 80’s, 90’s even 2000, however 2013, not so much. But as I went on I began to notice that the comic lacked one basic important ingredient, “HUMOR”. It wasn’t written by someone who wanted to make me laugh or even think, it was written by someone who wanted to lecture their views of guns. The comic ended implying that playing with make believe guns as kids will lead to the same kids wanting to play with guns for real when they grow up. Wow, no one has ever tried to make that point before, I can’t wait till next week when it will be about other never discussed topics like violent video games and movies.

Some definitions of Comic strips that I think of when I pick up a comic are; 1) A source of humor in art or life. 2) Amusing; humorous: 3 Characteristic of or having to do with comedy. “For Better or For Worse” contained none of these. So as I sat there last Sunday looking to the comics for a break from the constant barrage of unsolicited political opinions , I got more unsolicited political opinions.

I would like to suggest that you give this cartoonist some time off to find the humor in life again. Maybe at one time, “For Better or for Worse” was a funny, thought provoking comic but if this is the type of thing written on a regular basis I would recommend you rename it “No better just Worse.”

I was recently in the Seattle area for a wedding and had some free time to read “For Better or For Worse” in your comics section this past Sunday, August 25th 2013. As I read it, it seemed to be a normal cartoon about playing cops and robbers or Army with fake guns, a normal activity when I was a child in the late 50s early 60’s. As I went from one picture to the other I was surprised that in this day and age they were showing kids with toy guns something that would have been common in the 50’s,60’s 70, 80’s, 90’s even 2000, however 2013, not so much. But as I went on I began to notice that the comic lacked one basic important ingredient, “HUMOR”. It wasn’t written by someone who wanted to make me laugh or even think, it was written by someone who wanted to lecture their views of guns. The comic ended implying that playing with make believe guns as kids will lead to the same kids wanting to play with guns for real when they grow up. Wow, no one has ever tried to make that point before, I can’t wait till next week when it will be about other never discussed topics like violent video games and movies.

Some definitions of Comic strips that I think of when I pick up a comic are; 1) A source of humor in art or life. 2) Amusing; humorous: 3 Characteristic of or having to do with comedy. “For Better or For Worse” contained none of these. So as I sat there last Sunday looking to the comics for a break from the constant barrage of unsolicited political opinions , I got more unsolicited political opinions.

I would like to suggest that you give this cartoonist some time off to find the humor in life again. Maybe at one time, “For Better or for Worse” was a funny, thought provoking comic but if this is the type of thing written on a regular basis I would recommend you rename it “No better just Worse.”

If Elly thinks war is so horrible, how come she thinks her father was so heroic for serving in the Second World War?