By Andy Valencia
Even as an old dude, I still remember bits of my own boyhood. Parts were great, and parts were terrible. But I thought I should mention the thing that really sticks out in my memory:
Boys are the greatest force for good in the world.
The odd part is that, mostly, modern messaging is that they’re not much good at all. I grant you that if you measure this by their ability to sit quietly in rows of desks for hours, or to follow – precisely – directions. Or to only move slowly, gently, and quietly. To draw within the lines in the approved color? Then yes, boys are a failure.
This leads to remedies. Social pressure, punishment, and possibly medication. At home, there’s deep-fried, salty, and sweet foods. Video games. After adolescence, certain other distractions from the internet arrive. You don’t hear much from such boys, because they don’t do much. Mission accomplished – so long as you don’t look at that mission too closely.
For instance, they don’t go out and get ready to improve the world. Is the world so great that no improvement is needed or wanted? My own impression is that things are both far from perfect, and all too often moving in the wrong direction.
Boys, when their super-powers are not dissipated, are capable of becoming fascinated with a subject, and pouring into it superhuman amounts of concentration and energy. Tearing down a toaster? Rebuilding a carburetor? Building a wooden box? Most problems will succumb to concentration and tenacity, and boys can bring both of those to bear with a laser focus.
You can use the internet to show them that toasters and carburetors and boxes are all long-solved problems. That nicely misses the point. They will master what is known now in preparation for new problems that will only be fixed by new inventions born of ingenuity. Boys when grown into men will keep cities lit, develop new types of engines, and design and build houses that are cheaper, more comfortable, and more efficient. They’ll negotiate with other nations and avoid war. As manufacturing returns to the US, you’ll be lucky to have boys grown to men who can conceive of what a modern factory can and should be. Better than anything that has come before.
Let us hope that boys will use a little of their unleashed potential to study the question of what is good and what is evil. You can’t look up the answer on the internet, because the internet is a mirror maze full of lies. You can’t ask AI, because then you’re at the mercy of whatever answer it decided to steal. Or what it was programmed to give.
Each day delivers another installment of the future, and those with great abilities are most in danger of moving the world around them towards darkness rather than light. Not a new problem, our nation’s founders wrestled with these questions, as did all the great Western philosophers. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius from almost 2,000 years ago shared his own meditations on how to figure such things out. Let our boys join them in this great tradition of using their abilities with discernment.
Bring boys to their amazing, latent powers. Teach them to discern right from wrong. Raise them with love, and then let them get to work. They will repay you by knocking down one “impossible” problem after another, and building a future worth inhabiting.
