Chuckle #488 | April 11th, 2012
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I’d
like to think that my kids could survive in the event of a major catastrophe,
but I’m not so sure. They’ve lived in
the same town for 15 years, yet they still
use GPS to get to the library. For three
otherwise pretty bright kids, they have a terrible sense of direction.
What
if a giant space amoeba attacked earth and the kids had to loot the Mini-Mart in
order to survive? They’d have to find it
first, and the chances of that are pretty slim if all the satellites have been eaten
by space amoebae.
You
know how some people try to abandon their pets by driving them hundreds of
miles away so the poor things can’t find their way home? I’d only need to go about 10 blocks to get
rid of my kids. I’d have to take the dog to California, ‘cause he’s
a genius.
My
son recently went on a multi-day music field trip to VT. Two days into the trip he called to report (sheepishly)
that he was NOT in VT like we had thought, but was actually in CT. His explanation? ‘Foresty’ places in New England all look the
same.
A
more geographically aware kid might have wondered how the bus managed to get
from CT to VT in less than an hour, or
why his ‘Vermont’ host family didn’t raise their own chickens and serve granola
for breakfast, but not mine.
Part
of the problem is technology. Headphones
and electronic devices induce oblivion. But the gene pool hasn’t helped matters. I’m not saying that this is definitively dad’s fault, but he has similar
‘issues’ and this kind of thing is clearly hereditary.
Maybe
I’m wrong, but in a post 9/11 world, I would expect public schools to offer more
in the way of survival skills classes. They
don’t. Our school offers orienteering,
which is nice, but not nearly enough. If
there’s a catastrophe, I want to make sure my kids are prepared for the worst,
and I’m pretty sure that that AP British Lit is not doing that.
In
a Hunger Games situation, the CT kids would be milling around aimlessly while
the NRA sponsored kids from Texas picked them off one by one. The “game” would have been over in about 5
minutes.
The
only way to ensure my kids’ survival in the event of a doomsday scenario is to
fill Connecticut’s egregious educational ‘gaps’ with some good old fashioned
Eagle Scout/Independence Day skills building classes such as ‘Ten ways to Field
Dress a Squirrel”, “Spark that Flint!”, “Finding
Shelter in the Sewer System”, and “Defending Yourself with a Fireplace Toolset.”
My
kids, as usual, think I’m crazy.
They
claim to have learned sufficient ‘survival skills’ in third grade during the unit
on Harriet Tubman. But will knowing how to
identify ‘north’ by feeling the moss on a tree trunk be enough? I fear for them.
The
‘geographically challenged’ gene should have died out thousands of years ago
through the process of evolution. But somehow
that didn’t happen, and my kids are the result.
I haven’t done the genetic research necessary to fully blame my husband,
but I’m floating the ‘dad’s fault’ theory again, in case you missed it earlier.
Faced
with a crisis, and without additional training, my kids could very well run towards the tsunami wave, fail to find
adequate shelter from radioactive fallout, or get permanently lost in Venice
(which to be fair, isn’t that hard to do.)
Since
I love my children, I can’t simply let evolution take its course. To give them a fighting chance, I’ll add few
more things to our emergency preparedness kit, such as a map and a case of beef
jerky. As long as the Texas kids stay south
of the Mason Dixon, this should buy them enough time to find the Mini-Mart.
Who
knows? If aliens somehow manage to disrupt
magnetic north, my kids’ ability to interpret moss might, ironically, prove to
be the ‘survival’ skill that saves us all.
If
that actually happens, I’ll be the first one to admit that they were
right. I’ll even share some of my
roasted squirrel with them.
----------------------------------------------------
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