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speakup

You are probably thinking I have totally lost it, in even daring to take valuable space in this newspaper to write about being ‘drugged as a child.' However, I beg your pardon, and your patience for a moment.

We live in a world that is ‘drugged to death.' It is widely accepted that whether old or young, there has never been a day when people were taking more medication or prescribed drugs than they are today.

I am not asking you to go to your medicine cabinet and throw everything out. It just so happens that I take medication too, and there are days when my family questions whether I have taken it. For years, I would have poked fun at friends on some of these natural medications, but for various reasons, I am taking some myself.

I was drugged as a kid. Early mornings in the winter time, I was drug out of bed to help thaw frozen water pipes in a poultry barn so the chickens could survive. In the summer I was drug out to the corn field or the soybeans to pull weeds, under the watchful eye of my father while he rode the tractor with a two-row cultivator. Was I ever thrilled when the day arrived that I could drive the tractor and he trusted me with the cultivator. Had I never known what it was to pull weeds by hand, driving the tractor would never have been so enjoyable.

However, I was drugged as a kid! I remember being drug to the basement by my father for some ‘applied technology' when I misbehaved or disobeyed. At the time, I hated it, and didn't think I had a whole lot of love for him for the same, but time has changed all that. I thank God for the same.

Somehow I think those drugs are still in my veins and have had life long effects. They are stronger than cocaine, crack, or heroin; and if today's children had this kind of drug problem, we might not have as many societal problems today.

I see teenaged girls today, who, if asked by their mother to help in the kitchen, would likely stomp out of the house, and meet up with other rebellious friends somewhere in town, and get into whatever. Maybe mom should have tried this before she hit the teen years.

My brother and I were the oldest of seven, and we were drug to the kitchen sink, made to stand on kitchen chairs and wash dishes, and then made to dry them by hand for mother.

Some boys are no different. If it is the computer, or sitting on a tractor, that's one thing, but to ask them to take a fork and clean a barn stable, a shovel and clean out a grain bin by hand…no way! We have some very successful middle-aged farmers in Sussex area. I can remember when they were kids on the home farm, and they were taught to work. The present sons and daughters that are now running the Irving companies worked like any other company employee in the woodlands division or oil, or Cavendish Foods, during the summer while going to high school and university. I knew some of the foremen up in Juniper they worked under, and they received no preferential treatment.

Now I do realize, some of the best in parents have been greatly disappointed in the way the children have gone, and such has left them brokenhearted, and admittedly they tried.

The Bible teaches work ethics: Proverbs 20:11 "Even a child is known by his doings, whether his work be pure, and whether it be right;" and Psalms 104:23 "Man goeth forth unto his work and to his labour until the evening."

Now I know that successful farming or business is not everything, but if children are not taught responsibility and accountability, the end is disastrous. There was a man by the name of Eli in the Bible, and it says he restrained not his children, obviously either gave up, and gave in to them, and I would suggest he died prematurely of a broken heart. You can read this in 1 Samuel chapter 3.

When a person becomes a Christian, a child of God, born into God's family by the new birth of John 3:3, he comes to desire obedience to a Heavenly Father. As children of God, we too will be held responsible and accountable in a coming day.

mmccand@nbnet.nb.ca