| Moonduck |
12-04-2003 08:52 AM |
I was a Scout for many years. Some of the best times of my life were had wearing a BSA uniform. I had the advantage of being in military run troops my whole time. Living on military bases, the only folks that you have for Troopmasters are soldiers. This means we learned Real World outdoors lessons. When we shot, we shot real guns at real ranges. Our knives were whatever we wanted to carry (within reason) and they'd best be damned sharp. They would also yank you Totin' Chip in a heartbeat if you screwed around with your knife.
I also had the great fortune of being able to spend most of my summers on my Grandparents' farm in North Carolina. The BSA outdoors skills were useful there, but I had a lot more freedom and personal responsibility. My mother is fond of telling the story of how I dressed myself one morning, packed my own lunch, strapped on a .22 revolver "for snakes, momma", and had my Grandfather help me saddle up a horse for "a day's hard ride". That horse (a shaggy mountain pony) and I stayed out for about 6 hours, and my mother never worried. She knew that I could take care of myself and that horse would never let me get lost. I was six years old.
The biggest difference is trust. My parents trusted me, and trusted the folks living near my Grandparents. You could trust people more back then. They knew that if I got lost (honestly impossible as the pony HATED to go too far off my Granddad's land), I would find someone and they could be trusted to bring me home. They also trusted that I was a good enough shot at six years old to pop a rattlesnake if I had to (and I was). No other animals were dangerous enough to go for me on the horse, and I was too short to get off the horse (I'd told my Mom that I was going to eat lunch in the saddle, like all real cowboys do). On retrospect, I think that, while they trusted me, they REALLY trusted the horse. Heh.
I could grab a rifle, some ammo, and a coupla tin cans, and wander off for an afternoon of shooting with no real supervision. Again, they trusted me. They knew that I wasn't going to shoot a thing that was unsafe, or use the gun for mischief. I'd been taught from as early as I could even sit still and listen that guns were NOT TOYS. I never touched a gun without my parents' knowledge, and they knew it. It's another reason they trusted me.
For some reason, trust is gone today. No one trusts their neighbours with their kids. No one trusts their kids to stay out of trouble. No one trusts the stranger walking down the street. The world has turned from a great, big, wonderful place bursting with oppurtunity into a dismal jungle of fear where every person you see is a potential child molester, rapist, or Enron exec.
Why is that? I don't know, don't think anybody really knows, though I can point some fingers and make some guesses. They'd not be popular guesses though, nor is there any easy way to fix them. I think the root cause is a sea change in psychology and socialization caused by our technological evolution moving too quickly for our moral and social evolutionary processes to keep up.
Kids have access to far more information than we could've imagined as youngsters ourselves. I can remember getting an underground copy of "The Anarchist's Cookbook" as a Middle Schooler. As I was an avid player of RPG's (an original form of alternative counterculture education in many cases), a fair portion of it was old hat, but it was still educating in a lot of ways. I was also the rare exception in being able to get that book, and a lot of my peers REALLY wanted to see it. Heck, for a while, it was more popular than another friend's dog-eared Penthouse stolen from his Dad's collection. Nowadays, "The Anarchist's Cookbook" is positively tame. Lame, even. Todays kids can find out more actively dangerous info with a click of a mouse button and a few seconds' wait then I could've come up with in my entire young life. Do I consider the intenet at fault for the downspiral of morality? Not really. It's part of it, but I only mention the Net as example of how different things are today.
The worst part of the whole thing is that I am a parent. It bothers me badly that my daughter and son are not going to have the same oppurtunities that I did. They'll never get to spend an afternoon on horseback exploring honest wilderness in the Appalachian Mountains. They'll never get to build a thoroughly unsafe go-cart and go screaming around miles of ownerless hills. They'll never be able to go hiking while safely armed. They'll not be able to be kids in the same way I was able to. It saddens me.
I want my little guy to be able to wander out in the woods for hours at a time, wholly secure in the knowledge that the most dangerous thing he's likely to see is a rattlesnake. I want to teach my daughter to drive at 11 like my Dad did with me. It won't happen though. The world of my youth is dead and gone, and only the memories I have and the stories I can tell them remains.
I hate to be melancholy and melodramatic, but I weep for the future, and the childhood that kids today will never enjoy.
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