Barn Revolution

I know what is wrong with kids these days. They do not have a barn. They grow up play­ing video games in a house scrubbed with Lysol. No won­der they are so sickly. They have never had the chance to build an immune sys­tem. Noth­ing beats the microbes of a barn­yard for vari­ety and inten­sity. Live through that and you will live to be one-hundred plus. If the aroma of your house is chem­i­cal instead of a com­pos­ite of a dozen types of manure and dust, you prob­a­bly do not have much of a chance at stay­ing well — espe­cially if you travel to third world countries.

We had a barn when I was a kid. It had every­thing a child needed: snakes, spi­ders, rusty nails, wasp nests, bird nests, ants, mold, half-empty drums of crop spray, dust, pigeons, hor­nets, bro­ken glass, old machin­ery, rusted tools, cre­osote soaked tim­bers, hot tin, stray cats, an occa­sional skunk or two, one mad mother goose dur­ing nest­ing sea­son, and at least one por­cu­pine. What more could a child pos­si­bly want or need?

No child is wor­thy of a tetanus shot unless he or she earns it by step­ping on a rusty, dung-covered nail. The nail has to go all the way through the kid’s shoe and at least a half inch into the sole of the foot to count. If you are not in the emer­gency room at least twice before you are school age, you need to do early child­hood all over again.

I am all for sports, but if you want to really learn how to run, do what my brother and I used to do: throw rocks at wasp nests and then run for your life. Hand-eye coor­di­na­tion? You develop that with rocks, clods, and green gourds. If you can­not hit a goose in the head with a small rock from thirty yards, you have not devel­oped a very nec­es­sary life skill.

By the way, by the time I got to school I had a very dim view of Mother Goose. As a five year old, I stum­bled onto Mother Goose dur­ing nest­ing sea­son. She slapped me with her wings and took a chunk of hair out of the top of my head. If there is ever an open sea­son on domes­tic farm geese, I am going to set­tle the score. Blam! Good­bye Mother Goose! Score settled!

This coun­try needs a barn rev­o­lu­tion. Neigh­bor­hood co-ops need to be formed to insure that there is at least one large barn per city block (ani­mals included). Yep, Jesus was born in a barn. That pretty much says it all for me. Per­son­ally, I con­sider that one truth of his­tory to be the Eleventh Com­mand­ment! It is time to give our chil­dren a fight­ing chance at life.