My mom will be 93 on September 12th. She is telling
me about how strange it is to be almost a hundred years old. She went to school
with a horse and a buggy or had to walk five miles to go to the school. She had
a difficult life and had to suffer most of the time. People think that the
United States has everyone being rich. Even the way I live in the garage is
very wealthy compared to how most of the rest of the world lives. But when we
were kids, my mom would buy chicken feet and make soup out of this. We would
each get a bowl of chicken foot soup and a chicken foot for the meal. My
brother said that he had enough food stuck between his teeth that he could eat
another meal. I remember a lady asking my dad if I was sick. When he asked her
why she thought that I was sick, she replied that I was so skinny.
It was interesting because those were the good old days. As a kid it was super
educational because we had to make our own toys out of junk that we found in the
dump. I found a reel to reel tape recorder and a lot of tapes. It was a great
find. The tape recorder didn't work so I had to fix it. I was about ten years
old then. I used to pretend that I was a singer and record songs that I
played. Then, when I was fourteen my oldest brother bought me a code
oscillator. It was a Morse Code key that would make noise when you pressed it
down. I then took the license manual for the Amateur Radio License and went
sentence by sentence and recorded it on the tape in code. Next I would play the
tape back and practice learning the code that way. The next thing I knew I had
the paragraph memorized, so I went and did the same thing to the next
paragraph. Before I knew it I memorized the entire license manual.
What kid would do that now. Not a rich kid, there are too many distractions for
them. This is why the United States is using so many other countries for tech
support and other technical needs. Now, everything in the United States seems
to be free. It is expected for a kid to be given a car by the time he is
sixteen. Young kids have cell phones and are spending their time texting to
each other. Plastic and wood models are rarely sold to kids, it's the old guys,
my age, that are building these models. A model is an engineering training
tool. When I was a kid, every kid had a microscope or telescope or they were
considered abnormal and stupid. I still have my microscope which my dad bought
for twelve dollars when I was eight years old.
Tonight 8-20-2009 I was watching a program talking about how
water got on the planet Earth. They talked to one scientist that probably
knew more about meteorites than any other man on earth. He said that he
was lucky when he grew up because he lived in the basement of a meteor museum.
He said by the time he was two years old, he knew the names of all of the
different meteors.
Look at the advantage this man had as a kid. He
was in a super learning environment and it has stuck with him all of his life.
The exposure that I received from my older brothers about electronics and
aviation has stuck with me all of my life and now I own YellowAirplane.com.
When I think of Bill Gates, I realize that he was bought learning toys as a kid
or he wouldn't have been so smart to form Microsoft. The list of super
people can go on and on and the kids of the United States were the tops in the
world. Now on international test of middle schools, the kids from the
United States rank at the bottom of the list of countries that were tested.
What is the reason? It's pollution,
social
pollution. Today I turned the TV on and there was an elderly celebrity
talking about the new TV show, about how people got so rich. In the
commercial there was a dog hunching her arm. Then a commercial came on
talking about how your erection last. I can go on and on about this too,
but I'm sure that you get the idea. The TV Programming is not Programming
the TV, it is Programming OUR KIDS MINDS. Yet when a kid does what he sees
on TV, he ends up in jail.
I'm going to leave all of that there. What do we
need to do to get our country out of its financial problems. Start
teaching the kids the right things. Start setting examples that the kids
can follow. That's what we need to do. C. Jeff Dyrek |
Computers | Fly
to the Model Trains Department 
