According to Ferenc Mate “We’re not nearly as intelligent as we think we are.” All these years we have believed that change and advancements are for the best when really this is not always the case. As Mate states, we need to go back to a time when things were simpler, when we were closer to our families and we were happy. Today the biggest thought on most people’s minds is money. They want a good education so they can go to a good school, get a good job, have a family, and buy lots of things ultimately to live a happy life. For most, having children before finishing school really becomes somewhat of a burden, it “interrupts” their lives. Really something that should be considered a blessing is seen more as an inconvience. Something people just have to deal with. We put all this time, money, and effort into going to a good school and getting a good job, just to spend even more endless hours working to keep up with all the things we want. Then when children come into play, instead of sticking around and helping them we stick them with nannies or at daycares so we can continue to work away. Sometimes we really just need to rethink what is most important in our lives, we need to remember what it is to be a part of a family. Today in discussion someone mentioned something about having a home versus having a house and I believe there is a huge distinction. A house is simply a place for shelter when a home is somewhere that you can spend time with your family. Laugh, share, cry, and basically just feel comfortable with your family. Houses need love to make them into homes and this is something we all need to remember.
Mate gives a great example about how agriculture has dragged us away from our family lives. Instead of having a family farm and doing things for ourselves, we spend time farther away from where our products come from. He uses a great example of how the world is like a garage. “Put your car in the garage, shut the garage door and window, turn on the engine, and relax. Whether the garage air warms up, turns acid, or depletes its ozone is fairly irrelevant. What matters it that your dearest will be filling out the Widow/Widower Benefits Form by morning. Of course our atmosphere is arguably larger than the garage, but then there are a few million more cars, furnaces, factories, refineries, generators, steel mills and a thousand other wonders belching poison. And just like the garage, the atmosphere is closed.” I think this is a drastic but simple and great example of what we really are doing to not only ourselves but to our children as well. As we move further and further away from family life and caring, we are harming everyone we know and love. We have displaced ourselves from nature yet “how in the name of God could we be “against nature”?! We are nature”! As Mate discusses, we lived simple lives until the Industrial Revolution, and maybe those simpler lifestyles are what we need to return to.
In the book Ishmael An Adventure of the Mind and Spirit, Ishmael gives a man a scenario. He tells him “Consider this. Let’s suppose you’re one of this nation’s homeless. Out of work, no skills, a wife the same, two kids. Nowhere to turn, no hope, no future. But I can give you a box with a button on it. Press the button and you’ll all be whisked instantly back to prerevolutionary times. You’ll all be able to speak the language, you’ll all have the skills everyone had then. You’ll never again have to worry about taking care of yourself and your family. You’ll have it made, you’ll be a part of that original affluent society.” And continues to ask “So, do you press the button?” The man says that he would not push the button. Even though his life in this time period is horrible with no chance of it getting any better, he would rather live now struggling to get by day after day, when he could have a great life and know his children would be safe just without the technology. The fact that this man cares more about industry and the time we live in now rather than living in a time where he knows he wont have these kinds of things, shows how dependent everyone has become with the lifestyle of day. As Ishmael puts it “ It isn’t that you couldn’t bear giving up the life you’ve got – it’s that you couldn’t bear embracing that other life.” Even if it was for his kids safety and probably survival he just couldn’t deal with living in a preindustrial society.
It makes me wonder, what have we as a society really come to? Depending so much on things that some of us don’t even have. We’ve become so accustomed to a life and seeing others with a certain lifestyle that we aren’t willing to trade that for anything, not even for our families safety. Yes, it its true that some would take the deal and push the button, but most, especially those living a luxorious lifestyle today would not because they know what its like to get everything at the drop of a hat, and really not having to put in much effort to get that.
Today if you ask a kid to do a chore or help out with something, its like your interrupting their great lives. Taking time away from their sports or video games. Before most kids would love to help out because they liked to please and spend time with their family. Times have changed so drastically that its hard to imagine that anybody would ever be willing to go back to what life used to be like, back to the simpler times.
As for family, and as for our children, “family, one the stable base of our culture, is becoming a nostalgic memory.” How sad would it be to think that in 100 years from now, family is simply a way for reproduction? What if people really do forget the meaning of what a family really is? We need to take time to remember what our family really means and how important families really are. We need to change for the better not for only ourselves but for our children as well. As Mate states, “If we are to survive in a world worth living in, if we have enough love for our children not to condemn them to a life in a universal slum with unbreathable air, undrinkable water, and soil either too eroded, too exhausted, or too poisoned to feed them, then we will have to drastically change our habits.” Using energy and altering the environment is inevitable in our day and age. But if we can just really commit to making some type of change, even if it happens over a long period of time, we would be helping a significant cause. Maybe we wouldn’t be helping ourselves today, tomorrow, or even in ten years, but we will be helping our children. Its sad even say “IF we have enough love for our children,” it should be because we have enough love for our children. However, it is a thought we really need to consider because the way we're living right now, it doesn’t look like we really do.
A lot of time children get pushed to the side, ignored, and forgotten about. But this does not have to be the case. Children are just as important if not more important than adults. They are our future and we need to remember and respect this. In the words of Nancy Folbre “But in the long run, if we are careful, our children and our students will survive. We need to think harder about what being careful means.”
Finally, as Mate puts it "It is time for a Children's Bill of Rights. Every child born on this Earth has a God-given right to clean air, clean water, clean food, tranquility and unspoiled natural beauty. (And, on his birthday, all the rocky-road ice cream he can eat.) Children should be taught that. Should be taught to demand it. Should be taught, if the need arises, to fight it."
- The Invisible Heart by Nancy Folbre
- A Reasonable Life by Ferenc Mate
- Ishmael by Daniel Quinn
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