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Growing up my friends and I used to have multi-day war extravaganzas involving "guns' (sticks, squirt guns, BB Guns) and "grenades" (green pinecones, dirt clumps, rocks). These were always team events and I spent many long days in hand-dug foxholes carefully camouflaged by yours truly. When someone contested how "dead" they were, a scuffle would usually break out. If you were "dead" you had to sit things out for a while, which was more agonizing than school. Eventually one team would win. Then it started all over again until enough families were on vacation that you couldn't get a team together. Then we played tag until a few got back.
We learned a lot from this. It never occurred to me that we might have been displaying abnormal "signs of aggression". What happened to "boys will be boys"?
I honestly believe that we might not be doing the best thing by trying to stem every sign of aggression in children. It is a natural part of mammals that probably shouldn't get cooked of our gene pool out anytime soon.
What if the aliens come? They can cause all the trouble they want with assurance that our children will smile and offer them a flower.
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