The tin cup generation

The skills are not quite gone they are in books and on the Internet or in the heads of people living in the third world nations. It should not take long to dig the information up. The scary thing in this nation among young people is… how many can even read? Worse yet how many can comprehend and apply what they read? Today they would need to call a team meeting to figure out that cows do not grow in shrunk wrapped packages.

Our own government tells us to keep a three month supply of food and water on hand for each member of our family because in these days of just-in-time insanity inventories any disruption will clean the stores out in 24 hours. Of course few are paying any attention to what Homeland Security tells them to do, so many of them will be standing in line with their tin cup sooner or later. I think the tin cup generation will follow the postmodern X generation.

Let’s hear it for the ants

We are a nation that has totally, utterly, completely lost the ability to take care of ourselves. Virtually everything we own or consume – our homes, our transportation, our clothes, our food, our water, our basic sanitary needs – are provided by someone else. The division of labor has gotten so extreme that we are now parasitically lost without it. One small interruption and we’re in trouble.

I’ve heard it said that most Americans are so helpless and ignorant that we would starve to death standing next to a cow in a field of ripe wheat.

We are astoundingly vulnerable – not just because of our dependency on foreign oil and other such issues, but because we have lost much of the knowledge and connection to the skills of our forefathers, the wisdom mankind has honed since the dawn of civilization. We have lost that wisdom in only two or three short generations. The pioneer spirit may still be among us – after all, there are lots of entrepreneurs – but the basic, butt-hard, labor-intensive skills that used to be common knowledge are gone.