Editor of Sanborn Weekly Journal:
“Lois Lane’s 2¢” raised some very valid points. I’d like to add a few from a different generation.
Even in my time all families weren’t functional. I was raised until nearly a teenager by my maternal grandparents. From then on it was a lot of different homes, but along the way I was taught the value of an honest day’s work and the value that went with it.
In the world of education, I was fortunate to have Goldie Lee at Jacobus School in Butler Township and Bruce Crockett as our Letcher High School basketball coach to look to for structure. Not all educators are up and coming citizens, nor do they have the judgment that I would have wanted passed on to any children, but they are still in charge. I disagreed with many at the time. That is the point that needs to be made when publicly disagreeing with them, choose your battles and choose them wisely. Don’t pick a battle where the end result is your child learns a bad lesson in life, even though the Educator may have been grossly wrong, and trust me, not all teachers are as underpaid for what they bring to the workplace nationwide as they would like to have you believe.
It’s a much different world today, especially in farming communities. We made our own entertainment. I had my Daisy BB gun, which I used on sparrows; Grandpa paid me a bounty. When I grew up, there were commonly three or four families to the Section; most of those homes have long disappeared from the landscape. My grandparents were still farming with horses until they finally bought an iron-wheeled F-12 Farmall in 1940. As Grandpa said, “There are different kinds of people and they are all different in expectations. City people, town people and country people do not think alike, nor do they have the same ability to cope with life.” We were the only family in Sanborn County during the Great ‘30s Depression and not a public employee and not signed up for relief. Imagine that happening today, when most have their hands out to the government.
Children need structure and someone setting an example, which can be best done by their parents, if they are capable. Beyond that, they need examples in the institutions we support to assist those parents. If those things don’t happen or are overlooked, we end up with the types of behavior that happen in society, and none seem to be able to deal with them, though many so-called experts are generously compensated to have those answers.
It’s a deeper subject than can be fully examined in a letter to the editor or an editorial, though I thought you covered a lot of bases.
P.S.—You need to get your husband back on board on occasion. I enjoyed his columns.
Marvin Sundstrom,
Buckley, Wash.