I used to say (probably stolen from Lazarus Long *heh*) that you live and learn, or you don’t live long, but in today’s rubber-bumber society, that no longer applies. It’s be more accurate to say “You live and learn, or you don’t really live at all.” Or perhaps,
“‘A learning experience.’ The traditional three-word preamble to a burial.”
*heh*
I had occasion to sit down the other day with my parents–both in their mid-80s. They live a few hours away, so I don’t have a sit down with them all that often, though we do chat once or twice a week on the phone. One thing that struck me during our chat was that each of my now elderly parents are still learning… and using what they learn in productive ways.
Over the course of our conversation, it turned as it often does with them to the time when they were the most active in my life as parents. After all, that period does contain the most mutually shared memories. And yes, school came up, and, as usual, my status as the family changeling entered the conversation. *heh*
Now, unlike most Mass Media Podpeople, politicians *spit* and Academia Nut Fruitcakes, all my siblings easily have more intellectual capability than a head of cabbage. In fact, no dummies need apply at our family reunons. Still, I’m the odd one out among my sibs. For one thing, I’m almost certainly the only one that’d go back to school at the drop of a hat, were time and money pressures a tad different. Oh, not for a degree. Have enough of those. For the pleasure of sitting in a class taught by someone who knows more than I do and likes to share that knowlege with people who want in on it.
Oh, and I like taking tests. Just a wee tad competitive. No, not with fellow students, my competitiveness usually manifested itself in striving to outdo my teachers in some way. If it showed up to party at all. *heh*
Still, my sibs and I caught the learning bug from our folks, to one degree or another, and so learning new things is just what we do, even if not in formal school settings. Not all the same kinds of things, of course, but curiosity and imagination have made us into lifelong learners.
Some people aren’t like that, though. Some folks have to have new information crammed down their throats, packed into their heads like sand into a rat hole, poured into their stopped up ears and then hammered. And still they refuse to think about what they’ve (not) “learned”.
I think that’s a large part of the political and societal mess we’re now in: a large population of sheeple who have a hard shell of stupidity wrapped closely around a cotton candy fluff of contrafactual “truths” they’ve been drip-fed, NG-tube-fed, by the Mass Media Podpeople Hivemind after long and careful enstupiation (with the sheeple’s mostly willing cooperation, of course) by Academia Nut Fruitcakes’ and remote educrats’ Prisons for Kids, enstupiated parents (yes, it’s a generational thing, now), “edumacators” and real teachers who’re trapped in the machinery of “public schools” and dumbed down colleges, forced at every turn to surrender teaching to “edumacating” (lobotomizing) young minds.
What to do, what to do?
1. Don’t attack directly. Chip away at the hard shell stupidity covering the cotton candy ignorance with humor, ridicule. When the enemies of The People are shown to be fools, the sheeple may be open to being fed real food. Dennis Miller’s biting sarcasm comes to mind. Oh, you’ll not be able to reach a True Believer in Leftardism with Miller’s material, but those who are just among the common enstupiated sheeple might find a bit of the hardshell stuidity eroded by his ridicule of Leftardism.
2. Once you find any crack in the hardshell of stupidity, start pouring facts through the cracks. Facts are stubborn things. Amazingly, once facts can be brought into juxtaposition with the “reality-based fantasies” of Leftardism’s many lies, the lies begin to unravel. The difficulty is in finding the cracks in the hardshell of stupdity into which one can pour a bit of the antidote.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Unceasingly.
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So you were hard on your parents too? I can’t imagine that 😉
Perri,
“…hard on your parents too?” Hmmmm, could be…
Always different from the rest of my sibs. Notsomuch deliberately rebellious, just marching to the beat of a different drummer (while the rest pretty much sang along with the organ and couldn’t even hear the drums :-)) Starred in a local production of a little-kn own play, The Black Sheep. Was type cast.
Much later, after gradding with my first degree, I had a gig teaching in my “home town” school district. Even there, didn’t color between the lines. Was in a “hardship” school teaching a subject that was begging for (and finding few) qualified teachers, so didn’t even bother–or have to–with certification at the time. Gave my mother another unique birthday present that Fall. She’d been harping on it so much (for years) that I shaved my beard and gave it to her. She didn’t get it. As usual. *heh*
By now, I’m used to my parents (and often my sibs) looking at me like a calf at a new gate. It still happens. Fo gigure.
But “hard on [my] parents”? No harder than it was for me to wrap my head around them, I suppose, which is to say, yes. No wonder one of my degrees was heavy in counseling practica… *heh*
You would enjoy a talk written/given by a fellow named Douglas Callister. He was explaining the need to learn from the best books and the best music; to become familiar with these works so as to be prepared for that time when we go past mortality and into the companionship of our ancestors who strove to improve themselves daily. Callister went on to explain how the language of those in their advanced state of being will be well versed in the classics, books to be read over and over to learn more each time, as well as great music to be enjoyed. I see a close match with what you have put here. Glad you and your parents are able to enjoy your time together or on the phone.
nice post dude!..blessing to still have the folks ya know..and keep creatin a ruchus..youre good at it..(and I mean that in the nicest way) *wink 🙂
“Some folks have to have new information crammed dopwn their throats…”
Alright. You know I’m always searching for new words from you, but this one? Couldn’t find it anywhere! *winky*
It is very nice to have your parents. I won’t even start to discuss what my parents went through with me. Yikes!
Thanks for the proof-reading note, Rosemary. Now, wouldya kindly go back through my last few thousand posts and do some more of that? *LOL* (This post now edited to remove the typo you found–thanks.)
Yeh, Rosemary, TF, Angel, I am fortunate to be able to visit amicably with my parents. Probably says more for their forgiving/understanding parental nature extending over the years than anything else… other than their wisdom in picking their own grandparents so they have such longevity themselves. (How does one pick ones grandparents, anyway? 😉 Well, I was fortunate on all fronts in my choice of grandparents, too, so there ya go… )