It is unfortunate that today’s young people believe that high speed car chases are cool, that smoking or drugs are cool, that war scenes in which civilians are being killed is cool, that using weapons on (imaginary) opponents is cool.
Tell you what is Cool. From my wartime experiences as a 4-year old I can tell you that it is cool to having survived, that it is cool to be standing on the ground and looking up, when the bombers arrived over our homeland and towns and started dropping their loads on us. That it is cool to write about it. That it is not cool to fly over enemy territory with a fighter plane, open a hatch and unload tons of bombs onto unarmed civilians. That it is not cool to receive medals and standing ovations many years later as a war veteran for having done so.
A little story. In the 1980s while living for many years in the Foothills of Alberta Rockies, alone on my land with my horses, I also had a Quarter Section of bare land somewhere West of Cochrane, near Ghost Lake region. It was heavily treed. I rented it out to a group of City people for playing Paint Ball. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paintball ] . This land was heavily treed. Usually when playing Paint Ball you stick together in a group. I had several (“cool strong guys”) to later arrive out of the trees, crying, because they got lost. When it comes to being cool, how cool is that !
Womens’ rights movement – nothing is more cool than the early fights for womens’ rights. Not so cool is, if women fight other women, or treat their elders with disrespect, as happens in many western cultures.
Cool is if women get the same rights on the job as men, same payment, same conditions, same respect, same treatment. Not cool is to discriminate against women when a company or entire industry falters (like for example the oil industry in Alberta), and women including single mothers are laid off first. As happened specifically at Trans Canada Pipelines Company in Calgary, AB. It seemed that in the 1980s no explanations were needed for these discriminatory practices in that industry.
Cool is to help yourself and others, not so cool is to wait for handouts from a government.