I have long been concerned with the way our society has developed. We have an epidemic of shattered families and relationships that denies individuals the support they need to navigate life successfully. Despite the American myth of everyone going it alone in the old west anyone who has studied the history is aware that the Old West was built on small towns, barn and house raisings, cooperation, and pulling together for mutual protection and survival. It could not be any other way in a world filled with bands of armed bandits, hostile natives, and harsh natural conditions. Cooperation, by rugged individualists, built the west not “going it alone.” My father taught me that the “individual strings break easily but when woven together into a rope it is strong.” This was a message for us all about why we live in a community and should maintain good relationships with our family, neighbors, and friends.
My Dad was born in 1919 and I notice today that much of what he taught me has been lost. Perhaps it is in part because too many families are broken and don’t have the balance of both a father’s and a mother’s influence in children’s lives. Even some families that have both parents push so hard, are so busy (or let their children become so busy,) that they don’t have time to communicate the wisdom that they will need to truly live rather than just survive. Every Sunday, god-willing and the crick don’t rise, I will post a new “What Your Father Should Have Taught You.” I picked Sunday because that is a day that was reserved for family activities in my home growing up – we could not go see friends, invite friends over, or go our own way on Sunday. From church in the morning to Sunday dinner, to watching Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom and Disney at night, or being together in the woods or on the lake, we were together as a family. It is in families that we learn what it means to live.
Research has aptly demonstrated that the most lasting and meaningful lessons are taught in inter-generational learning. A system of learning that was seen in old TV shows like The Waltons, and numerous other movies and series, but we usually don’t see it in our society today. Our very education system denies this very effective form of learning by grouping children into the same age groups when in my father’s and mother’s day they were taught in one-room schoolhouses in Nebraska and the older children helped and took care of the younger ones. Such learning, cooperation, and the lessons learned about interdependence, helping one another, and community were perhaps more valuable than the lessons of reading, writing, and arithmetic which our society has failed at teaching anyway.
My father taught me something nearly every day. As we sat fishing, took walks in the woods, or simply sat watching Westerns or some other show together – and we talked about what we watched. Again, we talked as we cleaned out the rabbit hutches, built new ones (because anyone who has a male and female rabbit soon needs to make more rabbit hutches,) worked in the yard and our massive garden, repaired our cabin or puttered around the lake on our boat with the family. My Dad taught me a lot about nature and our interaction with it both at our cabin on the lake and in town where we lived on a corner lot. Our backyard spanned three yards behind us in a wedge that was only one house span wide at the curb – a third to half of that yard was a vegetable garden well fertilized with rabbit manure. My Dad wasted nothing. He repaired or recycled everything, and would shake his head at the wastefulness of the throwaway society that was developing around him.
For that reason, I am going to start focusing a Sunday blog (on family day,) on What Your Father Should Have Taught You for all those whose father was absent (whether deceased, abandoned, in prison, or due to addictive behavior – whether drugs or as a workaholic.) Because our society has clearly lost something valuable.
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I used to marvel at my father’s wisdom. He had memorized countless cultural sayings that he casually explained to me. They flew easily from him. Like the one above he mentioned more than once but the time I most remember is when we were hooking up a thick tow rope to a broken down vehicle to get it off the street and home where he could fix it. Nearly, every time we were together and doing something he would share and explain to me the wisdom of centuries in an easy conversational way that directly related to the task at hand. Wisdom I later found often came from his nightly reading of books, the Bible, or the writings of the Founding Fathers.
“Two are better than one for if one stumbles the other can help them up again. But woe to he who is alone and falls and has no one to help…Two can keep each other warm in the cold but one would freeze. If you look at a rope it is made up of many individual strands. Anyone strand breaks easily but when they are woven together it is strong enough to pull a car or a truck. We need each other. Together we are strong but separate we are weak and we will fall.”
No one can make it alone. Humans are gregarious for a reason. I hated the US Army advertising campaign that touted “An Army of One.” An army of one would be an army that died. Armies are by their very nature reflective of every other genuine human activity it is a cooperative effort. In the Old West a family isolated and by itself is just waiting to be overcome and victimized by bandits, mobs, psychopaths, and other desperate people. Like the isolated farmsteads of the Old West, others will see the smoke rising from their home and arrive in time to bury the bodies and talk about whether the attackers were a band of renegade Comanches or banditos. Those who settled the West were rugged individualists who made their own way and had their own beliefs and wanted to live their own way and not be dictated to by government or neighbors. But at the same time they were part of a community and worked together helping and supporting one another. Today’s society has lost this balance. Too many today are either so individualistic they are incapable of working with others or they or so slavishly trying to be part of a group they have lost their individuality. Neither way is the American Way. Rugged individuals who lived as they wanted but also helped their neighbor and supported one another, even if they didn’t see eye to eye. People admired when others spoke their mind clearly and they “knew where they stood” even if they didn’t agree. Rugged individualists who cooperated to achieve a goal that is the “American Way.” Two are better than one and the three-cord strand is not easily broken.
That is why the Old West was dotted with small towns and forts and the farmsteads grew up around them close enough to be supported by it. The same pattern was seen in the Dark Ages of the Middle Ages and before the civilizing and policing effects of the Roman Empire. Humans live in a community for a reason and that reason is even stronger today when our knowledge is overly specialized. A real community that wants to survive needs security personnel to maintain a constant guard, medical personnel, farmers, carpenters, a response team/militia, a smith, electrician/communications specialist, hunters, butchers, tanners, chandlers, leaders, and counselors/pastors because (as Napoleon said,) the psychological is to the physical as three to one. The Old West is littered with the bodies of families that were overcome by weather, injury, or violence because they had no support. Whenever new families moved in other families gathered and had a party of food, music, and work. An old-fashioned barn and/or house raising (such as is seen at the end of The Patriot, and many old 60’s movies when they still remembered what the West was really like.) When people tried to make a go of it alone and too far from community support they usually ended up dead or their farmstead failed and was abandoned. Two are better than one and the three-cord strand is not easily broken.
This isolationism is epidemic in our modern society as we give up real flesh and blood relationships with neighbors for online cyber-relationships that will do nothing to help us if our home catches on fire, a tree falls on our house, or our homestead is ravaged by a hoard or feral hogs. There is little in America more dangerous than groups of feral hogs. Even in the Middle Ages hunting boars was dangerous and if you didn’t have the time right the boar would kill you. You could spit a boar on a spear and have it still kill you before it died. Boar hunts, like survival in the Old West, were best done in groups. Two are better than one and the three-cord strand is not easily broken.
We need to remember the lessons of our forefathers that our fathers should have taught all of us:
“Two are better than one for if one stumbles the other can help them up again. But woe to he who is alone and falls and has no one to help…Two can keep each other warm in the cold but one would freeze. If you look at a rope it is made up of many individual strands. Anyone strand breaks easily but when they are woven together it is strong enough to pull a car or a truck. We need each other. Together we are strong but separate we are weak and we will fall.”
YOU CAN EITHER FALL ON YOUR FACE REPEATEDLY,
LEARNING FROM THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
OR
YOU CAN LEARN FROM THE MISTAKES OF OTHERS;
AVOID THEIR MISTAKES AND MAKE WHOLE NEW ONES THAT ARE ALL YOUR OWN.
– My Dad –
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