What Should We Pass Onto Our Children: Guns? Gardening? Geometry?

Sunday, August 8 2010

By: Sleep Sunshine

Over the last several weeks, I’ve had a similar conversation with many different people concerning the same topic.

What should we be passing onto our children?

Last drop; no more.

This topic has been rattling around in my brain for quite a while now, considering while finishing my current novel, The Rainbow Child, my next novel, American Empire, has been on my mind.  American Empire is an post-apocalyptic novel of sorts, where we, as in Americans, find ourselves cut off from our central government, by a consistent terrorist element, focused on decimating our basic government-provided staples, like food, water, electricity.

American Empire addresses the question: if you wake up one morning and find that water does not fall from your kitchen faucet, what will you do?

I’ve been intellectually chewing on this subject for a while now, and one of my main conclusions is that I’d be screwed.  And let me tell you, I’m not the only one.

How many of you, if clean water wasn’t pumped into your homes, would know where to get clean water?

How many of you, if Kroger no longer had any food, would be able to hunt and/or fish for your own?  How many could successfully tend a garden?

How many of you, if police in your town walked-off their jobs, would be prepared to take up arms in defense of your family?

How many of you, if electricity shut-off, not for a couple hours, but for months, would know how to insulate yourselves in preparation for winter?

A scary proposition, isn’t it?

Listen, I’m not David Koresh; I’m not predicting the end of the world, any time soon.  I’m not saying that tomorrow morning, you’ll wake up and find there’s no water falling from your faucet.  I’m simply asking a very relevant question: what if?

Which leads me to my next point.

What life skills do we choose to pass to our children?

I grew up in the middle class, smack dab in the middle of the middle class.  My father’s collar was as white as the bleach my mom used to wash it in.  I asked my mother the other day, I said, “Mom, when you and Dad decided to have children, did you talk about what things were vital that you needed to pass along to us?”

My mother answered that the most important things she and my father wanted to pass down were moral and ethical beliefs, a compassionate nature, the ability to read and write and do basic math, pride in oneself, etc.

I asked her, I said, “Mom, did you and Dad ever consider it a necessity to teach your children how to shoot a gun for protection or to obtain food, how to grow crops, how to build a house from the foundation up?”

“No,” she answered simply.

The truth of the matter is her mother and father didn’t teach her these skills, nor did my father’s parents, so they wouldn’t be able to teach them to me.

It’s my belief that many Americans could say the same thing.

This worries me.  It worries me that our civilization has evolved to a point to where parents are no longer passing down what I would consider basic human skill-sets.

Not much of a fighter, Homer brought other skills to the table.

Now, I am completely indebted to my parents for teaching me the skill of writing in complete sentences and reading, for both skills are paramount in my life (obviously), having respect for elders and myself, and compassion for humanity (which is the beating-heart of this particular blog).  I would agree with the people who would tell me, in a time of Biblical crisis, humanity will need a wide-range of people with a wide-range of skill-sets in order to survive.  They cite Homer as being a pretty important dude to Achilles and the Greeks.

But I worry that so many of us are no longer learning Life Skills, that the ability to shoot, to fight, to grow, to build will be selected-out of our species.

Let’s evaluate the current state of natural selection in mating.  (I use the terms “women” and “men” loosely, because I realize the modern state of human natural selection is inherently more complex).  Women used to look for men who could protect the family, provide for the family; I’m envisioning a big, burly frontier man with a thick beard and rough hands.

Natural Selection, frontier-style.

To a certain extent this remains true (though not the thick beard or the rough hands).

Women desire to mate with a man who can protect and provide for their family.  But modern men, in most cases, protect and provide for the family indirectly, through jobs that pay a wage which is then used to pay third parties: policeman to patrol the neighborhoods, soldiers to protect the borders, farmers to grow food, and slaughterhouses to kill animals.  And then these families raise children who are taught skill-sets similar to their parents, which are not trapping and hunting and fighting, and they have children even more far-removed from hands-on skill-sets until you have a huge portion of the population reliant on indirect means to provide basic human amenities: water, food, shelter.

We’ve outsourced these things, trusting others to provide them for us.  And it’s a more fragile arrangement than many people want to believe.  If these third parties fail to provide essential amenities, we no longer have the skill-set, from generation upon generation of naturally selecting it out of our DNA, to provide these things on our own.

So, I’d like to pose a question to you.  If you have children or you wish to have children some day: what are some things that are vital, in your mind, to pass onto them?

Thank you for reading.  Enjoy your Sunday.

–SS

When not worried about the state of civilization, Sleep Sunshine enjoys long walks in the forest preserves, in his imagination.  His first book The Rainbow Child is being polished as you read this while his second book American Empire percolates in his brain.  Formerly a writer and production coordinator at Black Entertainment Television in Los Angeles, Sleep Sunshine now lives in Chicago and puts food on his table by hunting squirrels and pigeons in Grant Park, with non-existent success, so far.

P.S. Mom!  Dad!  So hungry!  Please send money for food!