Where I live, kids don't hunt or fish very much, they play video games. Even 40 to 50 years ago, when I was a kid, there were only two kids in my grade school who were growing up in "gunny" homes; Doug, who is now a County Sheriff, and me.
That is the big difference between rural and urban people. When I was growing up, I didn't know ANYONE who didn't have a gun or guns. I didn't know any male who didn't also hunt and fish and play base ball, basket ball and fight and work like hell building fences, cattle gaps, moving cattle and horses, bailing hay, building barns and other out buildings or fixing the tractor, changing flat tires on trailers and the hundreds of other things that always needed attention and we were expected to attend to them and by god, we did.
But in those days, there were NO soccer fields. Heck, no one even knew what that was. The only place there was a baseball field was at the local high school or where we played in the cow pasture across the road from my house. We did have one basketball goal in the back yard as most kids had. There were no such things as video games. Heck, TV had just got started.
I will NEVER FORGET when I was a senior in high school, my first class was Biology lab. The teacher was Doctor Rainwater and he was an old southerner like me. My next door neighbor and I would get up and go squirrel hunting before school and we would hunt through the woods and cross the creek and come out behind the school in the mornings. We went to biology lab and stood our guns in the back of the lab against the wall with our game bags. Can you imagine what would happen if that were to happen today? Dr. Rainwater would come by our lab table and ask what we got hunting that morning and if we wanted to skin and clean it after class we could do that and put it in the biology lab refrigerator until we left school.
NOBODY in the class even so much as blinked or went near our rifles because EVERYONE, even the girls in those days were familiar with guns and they knew better than to mess with them. Well that, and kids had manners in those days and they didn't touch things that were not theirs. Well that, and if they did, they got a bloody nose for doing it and nobody got thrown out of school or arrested when that happened.
Heck, many times, we didn't even get a licking for fighting. The teacher would stop the bleeding and we went on with whatever we were doing before the dust up. And if it didn't end there, coach, a WII Marine and tuff as nails, would take the boys down to the gym, put boxing gloves on them and put them in the center ring and tell them to get things sorted out between themselves because if he saw any more of it, he was gonna beat their asses and he dang sure would. Just ask me how I know. I didn't want any more of that let me tell you because he would hurt you. It was just all part of growing up and it was expected. Hell, back then most people had common sense.
Back then, people didn't have money to go on vacation. At least we didn't down south. So we loaded up and went to the swamp and camped out and put out trout lines and jug fished while we squirrel and rabbit hunted because there were no deer and turkey like there is now. That was our vacation which was only the weekends because no one could afford to miss any work.
But something very bad happened to the kids who were raised in urban areas. The males didn't join the military and learn to be men and the government stopped the draft so they didn't have to learn. They didn't learn how to take the lawn mower engine apart and put it back together because they didn't have grass to cut or someone cut it for them. They didn't have an old tractor to work on, or their dad's pick up truck to learn about fuel, fire and air to make it run. They didn't learn about transmission gear boxes, clutches and ring and pinion gears. They don't know to loosen the distributor and turn it either advance or retard to time it if they didn't have a timing light. Hell, they don't know what a timing light is.
They never learned how to build anything. They don't know about wood grain or skill saws, or hammers and nails. They never had to help put on roofs or fix plumbing or electrical issues. They never had to rebuild the pump that supplied the water for each family back then. Like I said, they never learned to be men. They were and are a bunch of whimps and they have raised successive generations of WHIMPS.
And this nation is now paying the price for that. Heck, you talk to most urban raised men now and the only thing that makes them men is that biologically they do not classify as women and Bruce Jenner may have changed even that.
And it'sa dam shame.
