DMB Digest: Kids These Days
Hint: Africa is not a country, therefore Wakanda cannot be its capital.
We have a responsibility to humanity to ensure the next wave of American adults never try to search for an airBNB in Wakanda. This seems like a gritty non-negotiable tidbit of awareness to instill in wannabe adults. Too many folks my age have at one point or another attempted to become an expatriate in Agrabah, or even worse, Alibabwa. (You realize the latter is a fake character within a fictional story, right?)
A certain amount of ignorance can be dismissed due to the insular arrogance of being American. I mean, it’s my God given right as an American citizen to think of my culture as at least slightly more important than all the others. But the moment I attempt to find Hogwarts somewhere east of Poland on the map, is the moment western society has failed me (everyone knows it’s in Scotland).
As a parent, I have taken this responsibility seriously. One of the ways I’ve endeavored to push my two sons beyond their short-sited dreams of being social media influencers (may God have mercy on our souls), has been to give each of them a super-sized goal complete with a super-sized reward.
For my eleven year old, his challenge has been to write, rewrite, edit, and publish a book of at least 10,000 words. (I mercilessly whipped him over his usage of passive voice and forced him to trim down the occurrences of “he walked” from 364 times to less than 50.) He has worked toward this goal almost everyday for over twelve months. This is a kid who tends to dabble with candle-making for an hour before moving on to Airsoft pistols, then archery before wanting to play the guitar, I mean piano, all before dinner. He has the attention span of TikTok. He’s the kid who chews a stick of gum for ten seconds until the flavor’s gone. (I love you, son.)
But the reward for completing this monumental task was helping him build his very own, custom, PC. A hoss of a machine mind you. Yesterday, we assembled the PC. His finished book went live on Amazon earlier this week. And I’m proud to say, he knows Wakanda is not the capital of Africa. He knows Monaco is a city state where James Bond likes to hob mob with megalomaniacs. And he knows that Indochina is not actually in China.
If you will allow it, I just wanted to spend my missive this week being a proud papa. And while my son’s book is pretty bad in the grand sense of things, it’s a freaking amazing accomplishment for him and certainly better than anything I created when I was his age. He’s currently ranked #256 in Children’s Action and Adventure Sci-fi books. What do you say we push it into the top 100?
Now I gotta start cracking the whip applying fatherly encouragement on my older son.
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