Candid Camera

A lesson any parent needs to install in his children is to absolutely fight the scourge and mortal sin of laziness.

Now, I don’t mean that a child who stays in bed until noon is necessarily lazy, if they are up at eight and have been reading a book for four hours straight.

Or as long as they are involved in learning or doing something physical or intellectual. They could be researching the life-cycle of earthworms, or trying to memorise all the names of the craters on the Moon for all I care. neither thing is likely to feature very much in their life, but at least they are exercising their brains in some fashion. Similarly, I don’t care if they are building an entire miniature village of mud huts, and destroy their clothes doing it. In fact, that would be pretty awesome. Their mother would disagree, but you know women, they hardly see the potential of this future colossus of civilisation in its proto-stages.

What is not acceptable is the mental retardation that comes from watching TikTok videos and/or most of the trash one finds on YouTube as well as all the other streaming services. TV, does in fact, rot the brain.

And while flat out banning any TV is somewhat hard to do as well as impractical in many ways, especially if you want to future-proof them for the trash on it, and prevent them from doing the equivalent of what most Anglo/Teutonic teens do as soon as they hit drinking age: Become lifelong functional alcoholics. Because in many of those cultures, drinking was absolutely banned strictly, and then, when they hit 18 or 21, hey, you can drink all you want.

Mediterraneans feed their kids little sips of watered-down wine when they ask from a young age. I certainly tasted wine and beer long before I hit age ten, never mind 18. But I have never been a drinker, nor a smoker or other drug user. Mostly because I was future-proofed against it by my upbringing. Junkies were pointed out to us, and we had first class views to what daily consumption of marijuana does to people throughout our childhood, since many of the adult labourers in Botswana smoked it on a regular basis.

So it is with TV. One needs to educate them, maybe watch some shows with them and point out the degeneracy in even the supposedly “wholesome” and “family friendly” shows. But aside from that, if you are not on top of it, your children, and humans in general, will gravitate to sloth instead of effort.

Effort, learning, building, doing, achieving is a net good. And an attitude to be fostered and rewarded.

My little four year old son today wanted to help me while I was busy chainsawing and stacking up the cherry tree that came down with the flood and needs clearing along with several metric tons of other forest, brambles, and sticks, not to mention the mud-slide I need to find a way to format into some kind of channel. It’s not exactly work for a four year old. Nor for a fifty-three year old mind you, but there we were. And in his little boots and hat, and ear protection I put on him, he stayed next to me, sweating, red-cheeked, lifting pieces of logs that were small tree-trunk equivalents for him, and putting them in the wheel barrow for me. Then I showed him how to operate the mini-chainsaw, with both hands, making sure he was safe and I helped him hold it and he cut down several branches into manageable firewood ready bits. I was out there a couple of hours under the sun, I never asked for his help, he volunteered it, and he stuck with it, in grass that is head-height for him at least half the time too. When we finished he said he wanted to eat and he also asked if we could eat outside.

So we did. I got some salame, an apple, and some bottled water, and we sat down outside and ate together while he asked me a bunch of questions. About what the sharpening of the knife was all about first, then about animals and what kinds of animals there are and what they eat and so on. The mosquitos also decided to join us and started eating us, so we went back inside as soon as we had finished. The point is, as long as I engage the boy, his preferred way of being is to be outside with me learning and doing things. But if you don’t do that, he would soon be swallowed by cartoons on TV or playing some silly game on an iPad. As it is, when he and his little sister play together, it is fascinating watching them and seeing the kind of little worlds they build in their imaginations.

When they say you can’t re-create the past, it’s true. We need to create a future where such things are valued and the trash on TV is identified as such and understood as such. Not just by us, but by them.

Do you think I recall any of the TV shows I watched as a kid? I have vague memories of Lupin the III, Captain Harlock and Goldrake, all Japanese mangas that were quite popular in Italy in the 1970s.

But I recall going hunting with my dad from the age of 2. I recall seeing my first fox and the first time he asked me to pick up a bird he had shot and I said to him “But it has blood.” And, according to him, looked at him not only with obvious disgust, but as if he was an idiot for even asking me to do it. I recall firing a handgun the first time, with his friend from the army standing near us watching as I exploded a small puddle with my dad’s .38 special. I was 2 years old then too. And I recall other hunting times with him and my brother. I recall when my brother and I had to hold measuring staffs for him while he measured levels for an irrigation scheme that would never have worked and he saved his employer a lot of money by figuring it out before the project begun. And my brother and I nearly passed out from dehydration because it took hours and my dad had forgotten to bring any water and it was close to 40 degrees in the shade. Not that there was any shade. Just dried grass and dust.

And I remember a thousand other memories like that, good and bad, even though many of those events that had been photographed are lost to moves, and floods, and time. But I learnt from them and they shaped me. No damned TV program did that in my childhood. And even later, it is few and far between the films or programs I saw that sparked some meaningful realisation.

It’s not about the specific activity you do, as it is the false song of demonic laziness, that lures you into a stupefying situation where you don’t need to think, don’t need to act. When all you need to do is become a sort of human couch-larva that sits and absorbs false ideology, and false doctrine, and false “normality”, for lack of the small amount of testosterone, will power, and free will that doing —and thinking, but especially doing— requires.

That laziness, if allowed to grow leads to more laziness, and with it stupidity. The excuse-making becoming the go-to response whenever something is required of the person, some action, some input.

It reminds me of a thing I had read on the old twitter account called Shit my Dad Says, which was literally quotes from a millennial’s boomer father. It stuck because it was so familiar. It could have been my own dad saying it, and indeed, now, it could easily be me saying it to one of my older daughters. It went like this (my commentary added):

Dad: Have you seen my mobile phone?

Son (clearly uninterested and trying to avoid doing anything): No.

Dad (getting irritated): Well help me look for it, I have to go.

Son (Lazily and still not having moved from the couch): Uh… what does it look like?

Dad: It looks like two horses fucking! What do you think it looks like?!

This kind of response in my house was very likely at the first “No.” which would have been swiftly followed by something like:

“Well get off your ass and starting looking for it. Quickly!”

I know, most millennials and Zyklons will consider this as a tragically abusive childhood, but the reality is that while I might not have enjoyed it at first, even in childhood already, I understood that the reaction of my father to such behaviour was because he expected more from us, he worked his ass off, and the least we could do was move ours quickly and respectfully when he rarely asked us to do something. But the added bonus was that compared to all the other kids we interacted with, many of them looked like functional retards and cripples to us. We could all swim, shoot a gun, climb rocks, and drive a car before we were 15. We thought drug-users were idiots (because they are) and weak (ditto). We got into some amazing trouble and also out of it without our parents really knowing the details (most times anyway, though sometimes it was a tacit agreement that our solving it ourselves meant we didn’t officially get “caught” so, good enough).

What neither my brother nor I can ever be accused of is being lazy.

And if a few moral, or even physical, kicks in the ass are required to get us there, so be it.

And I am certain that our upbringing was not even remotely harsh when compared to that of children a few hundred years ago. Which probably explained why a well educated teenager was expected to know how to read in Latin and Greek too, aside from his mother tongue.

Consider these things; and consider that sloth often gets put at the back of the queue when the seven deadly sins are mentioned; which makes it all the more insidious.