Interesting times.
Early in my teens I began to demonstrate a bad attitude about people who farmed or did other types of labor related to providing the world with food, shelter, Etc.
I was always looking to come up with some cash, so my father whose wisdom still occasionally astounds me found me a gig mucking out stalls for a local farmer. Easy money I thought. What’s the big deal, Shuffle some shit around make some good money.
There were four stalls. When I walked into the Stalls I had to duck to keep from hitting my head on the rafters. When I finished , I could not reach up with a shovel and touch the rafters. In between there was a solid 10 hours of mucking through the nastiest kind of crap you can literally imagine. At one point ducks and chickens had used the stalls so there was a liquid layer of chickenshit on the bottom with an Indescribable texture and aroma and I vomited and vomited.
This education about the realities of farm life was one I could not have paid for.
Naive as I was, I thought to myself man if people would just have to experience these things for themselves and learn the lessons that pain and suffering could teach you there would be a lot less misunderstanding and a lot more respect in the world.
And then I met Jake. No not Jake from State Farm, a kid who came to my highschool in my junior year. His family had horses as well, and he railed against mucking out the stalls even though he enjoyed riding the horses. He made it very clear that people like him paid other people to do that type of work. He was upset because when his parents purchased him his first car it was a three year old model and not brand new. Of course it was a low mileage Porsche when every other kid in the school who could even afford a car had a hand me down hooptie.
Jake had decent parents, and I suppose they did their absolute best, but he had a built-in sense of entitlement that prevented him from seeing any side of the story but his own. To my knowledge this follow him throughout his life because people who know him now tell me that he is just as disagreeable as he always has been.
This is not a class thing, I know plenty of people who don’t have a pot to piss in that have the identical sense of entitlement and a large portion of that entitlement is feeling entitled to tell other people how they should live.
When I see that some person has been attacked or abused because they didn’t support the correct political class it makes me want to give them a mucking out stalls type demonstration of the error of their ways. But I know that they will never learn and I know that it is outside of my skills to convince them. Perhaps there is somebody that could do this but I know that it is not me.
Instead I think about employing my father’s other method of education which involved his razor strop.
But the people that are in most need of an ass whipping would not benefit from it because they would immediately think of it as unfair oppression. Regardless of whether or not they had earned that ass whipping.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know how to educate the people I see destroying other people’s property and harming people in the name of their idea of Justice. I don’t know how to connect them with grim reality. I mean I know how I would like to do it but my Christianity compels me not to act in that manner.
We live in interesting times. I hope that my moral fiber is adequate to prevent me from ignoring my Christianity.
Yeah. Not sure anything can fix that. Some people get it.
It will be real hard to remember God loves us all when they are herding us into the ovens.
I think I will go down swinging. But there is still some time.
Have too see what happens in a few days. Looks like 15.
Yup…my parents did give me a small allowance for the chores I did around the house as kid but if I wanted REAL money I had to find a way to earn it. Near where we lived was a place we all called “the Poor Farm” which was owned by the state, and run by man named Myron who was in his 60s when I met him. He was a widower who lived on the farm with his two sons, and also living on the farm were individuals who had been discharged from a nearby state mental hospital but who had no place to go and who couldn’t hold down jobs. Myron ran the farm and he and his sons to a degree cared for the individuals who lived there. My buddy and I used to go down and help out to make a few bucks here and there and your stall mucking experience is one I am well familiar with…LOL! Our big paydays came when the corn crop came in though, we’d get down there when it was still dark and there would be a list for us of what needed to be picked to be sent to various state hospital/car facilities, prisons, etc. and once we’d filled out those requirements whatever we picked we were allowed to sell, there was even a roadside stand we could use. Myron didn’t give us any real parameters and I don’t think expected our ingenuity, as we ended up hiring several other kids to pick corn and we contacted local restaurants and even small grocery stores and produce stands. Our personal overheard was minimal so we could offer great prices, and Myron never blinked an eye at the quantities we sold…and by the time we were graduating and heading off to college we handed our customer list off to him and he hired kids from the neighborhood to continue the racket we started. Hard work but good memories.