Did you ever hear this phrase from your dad while you were growing up? Growing up in a small Midwestern rural farming community as I did, it seems like I heard this at least once a week. This phrase ranked right up there along with, “If you aren’t using a light, turn it off!”
Yvette Mimieux in The Time Machine
This topic reminds me of a dialog from the 1960 movie The Time Machine based upon the book by H.G. Wells. The movie starred Rod Taylor as the main character and Yvette Mimieux as the beautiful girl he falls for in the future named Weena. Taylor time-travels to a future post-history society in the year 802,701 where no one is older than perhaps twenty, and everyone is supposedly living “the good life.” In the course of trying to understand how their society works, Taylor engages a young man in one conversation in which he asks about where their food comes from, and their clothes, etc. At first he assumes that the Eloi society is so advanced that no one has to work anymore and the society is completely self-absorbed in the arts, education, and self-improvement. But this young man answers by saying that he does not know where the food comes from, or the clothes, and doesn’t care to know because these staples have always been provided and (somehow) it will always be that way. The answers to Taylor’s questions unfolds as:
Rod Taylor in The Time Machine
We have no government.
Laws, there are no laws.
Where do you get your food and clothing?
Doesn’t anyone work? No.
Where do all of these things (the food and clothing) come from?
It just grows, it always grows.
Taylor soon figures out that the above-ground humans are being bred and raised like cattle, having fallen prey to the sub-human Morlocks who live below ground. But I am most captivated by the last line, “It grows, it always grows.”
Raising my kids as I have in Southern California with its perfect climate, its beautiful and perfect people all around, and all of the other trappings of this almost idyllic society, my kids have never really known what it is to go in want. Even though one of my sons spent an entire summer in Sudan as a medical missionary, and my daughter just returned from spending last semester in South Africa, there is a world of difference between visiting another society and growing up there. Kids in America these days think that America’s future is going to be just as rosy and prosperous as the past, and yet they are truly clueless about what has really made America successful and prosperous. Our colleges are graduating far more want-to-be CEOs and lawyers than we could ever use, whereas trying to get most American kids to look at engineering, science, mathematics, etc. is an up-hill battle. The love affair amid our youth with non-profit companies and an outright disdain for productive free-enterprise is completely out of balance. I have often quipped, “If everything is a non-profit company, who in the world is going to pay any taxes?” The bottom line is that even if our kids have not personally experienced the good life, they have certainly witnessed it all around them by simple virtue of having grown up in the USA. I marvel at how generous many of these kids are with the wealth (of their parents) which they had nothing to do with in creating themselves!
The Time Machine
In my next post, I will offer some ideas to help you as parents in this area. And no, money does not grow on trees any more than the lawn will mow itself, or the chores will somehow miraculously just get done 
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