My stepdaughter has a forty year old husband who is letting the rafters rot on their house because he doesn’t know how to make a simple roof patch on a very low slope shingle roof and he has spent the money that should go to home repair on expensive lunches and season tickets to ball games at his favorite school. He is hoping a hail storm will come along and they will get a new roof paid for by insurance before the house falls down. They have two sons, one just turned eleven and the other will be fourteen in January and these boys are learning NOTHING from their father about how to make it in the real world. They are experts at video gaming though. By age eleven I was a farm hand when I wasn’t in school and by fourteen I knew how to grow a crop without any further instruction from anyone. I had an older brother who turned fourteen shortly after I turned eleven just like these two and by the time my older brother was fourteen we were taking care of the farm while my father worked construction. I didn’t realize at the time how fortunate I was. I see young “adults” now acting hopelessly stumped by the sort of little problems that we were handling with ease as teenagers. We could have patched that roof before breakfast on a Saturday morning. Re roofing the whole house would have been a matter of my father getting a couple of neighbors to help us and it would have been done in a day for the cost of materials. The old American “can do” attitude seems to be nearly dead.
Country Boy Can Survive
Hank Williams Jr
The preacher man says it’s the end of time
And the Mississippi River she’s a goin’ dry
The interest is up and the Stock Markets down
And you only get mugged
If you go down town
I live back in the woods, you see
A woman and the kids, and the dogs and me
I got a shotgun rifle and a 4-wheel drive
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive
I can plow a field all day long
I can catch catfish from dusk till dawn
We make our own whiskey and our own smoke too
Ain’t too many things these ole boys can’t do
We grow good ole tomatoes and homemade wine
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive
Because you can’t starve us out
And you cant makes us run
Cuz we’re them old boys raised on shotgun
And we say grace and we say Ma’am
And if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn
We came from the West Virginia coalmines
And the Rocky Mountains and the and the western skies
And we can skin a buck; we can run a trot-line
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive
I had a good friend in New York City
He never called me by my name, just hillbilly
My grandpa taught me how to live off the land
And his taught him to be a businessman
He used to send me pictures of the Broadway nights
And I’d send him some homemade wine
But he was killed by a man with a switchblade knife
For 43 dollars my friend lost his life
Id love to spit some beechnut in that dudes eyes
And shoot him with my old 45
Cause a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive
Cause you can’t starve us out and you can’t make us run
Cuz we’re them old boys raised on shotgun
And we say grace and we say Ma’am
And if you ain’t into that we don’t give a damn
We’re from North California and south Alabam
And little towns all around this land
And we can skin a buck; we can run a trot-line
And a country boy can survive
Country folks can survive