WE ARE NOT TEACHING OUR YOUNG PEOPLE ENOUGH

WE ARE NOT TEACHING OUR YOUNG PEOPLE ENOUGH

　

When I say we aren’t teaching our young people enough I am not talking about schools or teachers. No, I am talking about you and me. I am talking about parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents and employers. You should be teaching the young people around you every day. Teach them everything. Nothing is too trivial and you never know what little thing is going to be valuable to them in the years ahead. Neither can you ever guess what little tidbit is going to spark a young mind and send it in search of more information or a great discovery.

My youth skipped out on me decades ago but my memory is still good enough that I remember some of the many things that my father taught me but I also remember many things that he didn’t teach me. These words are not meant to be criticism of my father. Far from it! My father was a good man and his example gave me priceless knowledge but, like all of us, he didn’t realize the importance of passing on everything he knew. I think I learned most of it as time went by but it would have been an advantage for me if I had known it earlier. If he had explained to me about the various types of saws and how they cut or what makes a syphon work. Or if he had shown me how to figure interest or the ways to save money and make it earn more money. Perhaps he could have taught me how to listen when people talk and how what they didn’t say was often more important than what they said.

Now that I have been a father and an employer I can see that I have failed in the exact same ways that he did. I could have taught the young people in my life so many things but I thought that most of it was unimportant and that they wouldn’t be interested anyhow. From a position of hindsight, I can see how wrong I was. Nothing is truly unimportant. Everything should be passed on and let the recipient decide what is important and what is not. Also consider that if the recipient later decides that something was important after all, they already have the knowledge.

So go ahead, every chance you get explain to some young person what makes moonlight and the various phases of the moon. Show them how to splice a bandsaw blade and how to make a cup of tea. Tell them about the animals you knew when you were growing up and the first cars you rode in. If they show a spark of interest, elaborate on the subject and ask them to tell you their experiences.

Don’t criticize the school or the teachers unless you are doing your part. If I could do it over I would make it a priority to pass on all of the knowledge I possibly could. Every time I learned something new I would pass the knowledge on to a younger person. Unfortunately, I am now at the age where people look at me and automatically assume that I have some degree of senility and this causes them to have some doubt about anything I tell them. The best thing I can do now is direct them to a reliable source and I do that quite often. Whatever it takes to give them the knowledge is worth doing.

KILL IF YOU MUST

At first it only happened at night and the vandalism was rather moderate so I overlooked it. As a matter of fact, I overlooked it too many times. I should have done something about it sooner but he was clever as well as sneaky and increased his destruction bit by bit so as not to trigger my indignation. Also, he skipped from one location to another so often that I sometimes didn’t notice the new vandalism for several days. I would often repair a spot and it would remain undamaged for so long that I would be lulled into thinking he wasn’t going to harass me anymore but then I would discover that he had sneaked in under the cover of darkness and vandalized somewhere else. This continued for months before I admitted to myself that it wasn’t going to stop unless I did something to stop it. But what could I do? I didn’t know what he looked like or where he went to hide from me. After some investigating I thought I had found his hiding place so I very craftily piped engine exhaust into the place and felt sure that I had removed him from my life. Wrong!! He retaliated by making a total mess of part of the flower garden.
Obviously, the battle was on but I was completely stymied. However the vandalism stopped so I had won the battle after all. Wrong again! He had merely moved his attacks to another area and I didn’t see the new vandalism for nearly a week. I went to work repairing the new damage while I pondered what to do next. He definitely knew he had the upper hand and became extremely bold. He began hitting multiple spots at night and even committing his acts of vandalism in broad daylight while I was napping or away from home. Now he had pushed me too far and I was angry. I vowed that I was going to stop him even if I had to kill him.
It was at this point that a neighbor stopped by and, upon seeing the widespread devastation, informed me that I was mistaken about it being a mole. He told me that it was a pocket gopher and he told me what he had been told about trapping pocket gophers. With renewed hope and determination I followed his directions with high hopes of celebrating a victory. Wrong once more! I soon had visions of a pocket gopher thumbing its nose at me as I tried various modifications of my neighbor’s suggestions.
In defeat and dejection I resorted to high tech help for a low tech problem. I went to the internet in search of help with pocket gopher control and found a video that gave detailed instructions for opening a pocket gopher’s burrow and setting a trap. The trap that was used appeared to be quite different than most traps but now my hopes were revived because I had been given a similar trap several years before but hadn’t known how to use it or what its purpose was. Now I had the answers to both questions so I followed the instructions from the video. When I uncovered the opening into the burrow a few hours later I found that the trap had worked perfectly and the pocket gopher had been killed humanely and instantly.
No doubt my grandfather would have been thoroughly disgusted to know that his grandson could be so ignorant that he would have to call for help to deal with such a small problem as a pocket gopher. Would he have resorted to killing? I think the answer would be a definite yes. Would he have had a dog that would dig one out and kill it? I don’t know. I would like to ask him but I can’t.

WHY ECONOMIC STIMULUS PACKAGES DON’T WORK

　
　The Obama administration and Bernanke are preparing for another failed attempt to stimulate the economy by throwing money at it. They would have a good chance of making it work if the government had some money to throw but the government is bankrupt.
Even if we were to go back to ancient times when the U. S. Government was not in debt, the government could not stimulate the economy with money because the only money the government has is what it takes from the citizens. Government does not produce anything or earn any income. The only source of money the government has is the citizens of the nation.
Therefore, when the government offers a stimulus package it does it by taking the money from the citizens and then handing it back to them, wasting a big part of it in the process. It doesn’t take a genius to see why that isn’t going to work. The government can borrow the money but all that does is delay the consequences and put the burden on people who aren’t even born yet. The past stimulus packages have proven that some of the people who receive the stimulus money spend more for a short time while others merely use it to pay off debts or put it away to use later. The economy may get a slight boost in one area but the overall effect is negative because more money is taken than is given.
So what is the answer? The answer is to remove the shackles so business and industry can come home again to American shores. Give business and industry, large and small, more freedom and more incentive to produce. Then they will do what government can’t do and that is produce goods and produce wealth.
Government talks about creating jobs but government can only create jobs by taking money from the citizens to pay for those jobs; another negative result. If government will get out of the way, private enterprise will create the jobs and pay the salaries while, at the same time, providing revenue for the greedy, wasteful government.