“A member of an elite paramilitary organization: Eagle Scouts.” – Red Dawn
I have a friend who has a trophy wife. It wasn’t first place.
I once had a position with a certain paramilitary organization aimed at youth who identified as were boys. I have always raised my own children by a simple rule: if they thought they were old enough to try something, they probably were. A related rule was: if I thought they were old enough, I’d make them try something. Especially if it made my life easier.
Five-year-olds can do drywall. I mean, through the tears, that is.
Obviously, this got mixed results. The judgment of a ten-year-old is not as good as that of even a boy two years older. When I asked Pugsley to warm up the car one winter evening when he was 10 or so, while sitting in the front seat he did a neutral drop at high RPM. Right into the house.
Live and learn. Weirdly, we managed to put the wall back into place (mostly) with a mallet. Was I irritated he ran a car into our house? Certainly. But, independence has costs.
Learning is never free.
I promise to stop using police-related puns. I’ll give them arrest.
When I later became a paramilitary organization leader to other boys in addition to mine, I found something interesting: most parents hadn’t taught the boys even rudimentary life skills or woodcraft. Lessons I had learned just tromping around Wilder Mountain seemed like magic to them. It made sense. We don’t really live in a world that values those skills.
In my first campout with the boys, one of the skills we focused on was simple: building a fire. To my amazement, half of the boys hadn’t done that, ever. One of the oldest boys on the campout was around sixteen. He worked on his fire for over an hour. In that hour, he learned a lot of ways to not start a fire. Finally, he got it going.
Me: “Okay, good job! You can put it out now.”
He didn’t. It was the first fire he’d ever made, and he stoked and babied that fire like it was the first one that mankind had ever mastered. And, for him, that was true. He kept that fire going for hours.
There was a fire at Goodwill® today. No injuries, just some secondhand smoke exposure.
I learned as much from the boys as they learned from me. In this moment I learned a real, hard fact of life. When that boy made his first fire, he didn’t need a badge. He didn’t need a medal. What did he need?
Nothing. He had struggled for an hour to make that fire. His reward wasn’t anything outside of him. His reward was the skill. In a sense, that real, physical fire had started a metaphorical fire in him.
Give that a thought. Soccer leagues give children participation trophies so their feelings aren’t hurt. I’m not sure anyone understands the damage done by those hunks of gilt plastic. The trophies are cheap, but the sense of entitlement created by them lasts a lifetime.
When a man makes a fire, or wins a judo match, or does something that is his and his alone, the medal isn’t the accomplishment, the medal is the acknowledgment.
A child who grows up in Montana who can ride a horse, skin an elk, and shoot a rifle straight and true doesn’t need a medal. They don’t need outside affirmation. They are who they are.
Arnold was a great gardener. They called him the Germinator.
That’s the rule of the Greatest Game. Struggle. Learn. Master. Repeat.
Missing? A trophy. Why is it missing? It’s simply not necessary.
We live in a culture where people don’t have to struggle. I imagine the only meal missed in recent memory by readers here is one they chose to miss. Food in this day may be more expensive than it was last year, but it’s still everywhere. The calories to feed a person are plentiful.
So why are video games popular?
They’re popular because we’re wired to Struggle, Learn, Master, and Repeat. Deep down inside, though, we know it’s only a pale shadow of the Greatest Game.
Technology has improved so much that it has interfered with the programming that is at the core of what it means to be human. To be the best that we can be, the struggle has to be worth our time. The game has to be worth playing.
No matter how bad you think you are, Moses was worse. He broke all of the Commandments at once.
I think that a lot of the dysfunction in our society stems to that – people who would have mattered to their tribe back in 200 B.C. or 1,000 A.D. are simply playing their parts in big machines. Our technology has changed our culture. Our culture has changed our roles in society.
These changed roles weren’t made with men in mind, they emerged from the technology. Even 140 years ago, the typical farmer and his family often had to fabricate many if not most of the things that he depended on. That led to independence.
The farmer was free in a way that people chained to an international financial system and a technological corporate machine aren’t. He was free to succeed, or free to fail.
What mattered was how he played the Greatest Game.
We’re still here. We can play the Greatest Game, because, surprisingly, it’s still out there. Each day we have the chance: Struggle, Learn, Master and Repeat.
Me? I’m still learning to make a fire or two.
