Kerry asked:

Should children be allowed to play with war toys?

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Let me put it this way. My sister and brother-in-law, an anthropologist and a pediatrician, respectively,
and both very conscious of things like violence, sexism... etc etc... had two children, a boy and a girl.
As soon as the boy could reach out, he created weapons, played with sticks, anything that could be
turned to violence. As soon as the girl could, she played with dolls, beads, etc. Talk about
stereotypes. And nothingtheir parents did or does makes any difference. Now, surely, there are both
cultural and hormonal influences in this... hey, I'm not denying any of that. But your question, it seems
to me, and believe me I'm not happy with this, just seems to miss the point. It's not a matter of
allowingchildren to play with certain types of toys (and I'm just as against the Barbie thing as I am the
soldier thing, believe me). It's a matter of changing, in my opinion, bothculture andhuman nature.
Now you pick the easiest, and tell mehow to do that... because I don't have the faintest idea as to
how. And I don't think that changing either separately will be the answer, if it comes to that. Yes, I am
in favor of genetic engineering... as extremely dangerous as that will be... look at human history;
could we be any more cruel, violent, repressed, stereotyped than we are? What do we have to lose?
Perhaps, hopefully, we will (probably purely by chance) create a race that will be both compassionate
andintelligent enough to protect itself from us, to supplant us.

Steven Ravett Brown