Note: Emmy is my baby and Crissie is my baby’s momma.
“Emmy, say yes ma’am!”
I don’t really yell it, but when Emmy says “yes” or “uh huh” to Crissie, I correct her by saying “yes ma’am” until she repeats it. Emmy has until her next birthday to get this figured out before corrective measures are heightened:
I’d like her to respond to me with “yes sir” as well, but I’ll be damned if she isn’t going to show mommy the highest respect.
Aside from the birthing, breast feeding, and raising of two children including me, Crissie makes a living as a pharmacist.
Imagine one day, those impossibly stubborn people you shake your head at on Facebook arrive at your job with information from a daytime television ad that they’re convinced trumps your doctorate. To make matters worse, Mr. Jerry Attrick and the gang like to arrive an hour before opening and demand to speak with the manager when they don’t get their way. Telling them you are the manager doesn’t help; after all, you’re a woman and too pretty to know anything.
The point: Crissie loves hard and works hard and Emmy doesn’t get to respond to her with “uh huh.” As my high school government teacher, Mr. Ferretti, used to say, “that dog won’t hunt.”
Why it matters.
Everything is downhill from culture.
When asked about what form of government he and the Founders had created, Benjamin Franklin responded with, “a republic if you can keep it.” What he meant was they had designed genius guardrails for preserving liberty, but Americans would have to continue cultivating the right culture for it all to work. No words on paper will save us once the morons reach a critical mass.
Speaking of morons, remember the spring breakers that refused to stop partying after the coronavirus broke out? That’s an example of culture gone wrong. There’s annoying woke culture that will be mad at me for quoting Benjamin Franklin (a slave owner before becoming an abolitionist) and then there’s this brand of f*** your feelings culture.
You don’t care about my feelings, bruh? Fine. What about your grandma’s?
Anyway, much of culture stems from language. Think of culture as part of the software downloaded onto your brain’s hardware and language as the code that writes the software.
My hope is that getting Emmy to use ma’am and sir will help download the part of the Respect Others software package that deals with understanding her place below her elders in life’s pecking order.
Having kids use ma’am and sir might seem archaic, I get it. Maybe it’s just a Southern thing. I won’t judge you or your kids if they don’t use them. However, Emmy’s friends that do use them will get more scoops of ice cream and have veto power over slumber party movie selections.
It’s not that I put words before actions. It’s that our words often become our actions.
P.S. If your kid can get me on at Augusta, they can call me cocksucker and still get birthday presents for life. Who cares about culture when you have that type of juice?
RIP Bill Withers (1938-2020)
RIP John Prine (1946-2020)
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