The power of old men

I can’t help but think that one of the reasons I didn’t swallow all this – including the dislike of “rednecks” that lay behind it – was my learning from all these old men. Though most of them had never graduated high school, they were teachers every bit as much as the professional educators I studied under elsewhere.

That shouldn’t be a shock, given that old men teaching young men – especially about arms and such — has been the norm for nearly all human societies before ours. And it’s not as if it doesn’t happen anymore, though you have to read the reporting of people like Salena Zito to hear much about it.

Grandfathers are harder to come by, nowadays, in a society where fathers are in short supply. And old men who want to teach young men are now viewed with more than a tinge of suspicion, something a cynic might say is not entirely based on a concern for the welfare of those young men. Boys, young or teenaged, are now mostly taught by women, and by “mostly,” I mean “overwhelmingly.”