It's The Pitts 

By Lee Pitts

I find it frightening that baby boomers may be the first generation in our nation’s history who have collectively never milked a cow. That fact alone is responsible for a culture of milquetoast handshakes, spoiled kids, and consumers who have no idea where their food comes from. Sadly, we live in a society that criticizes the cow while cutting the cheese.

These days, chore-less city kids sit on their duffs and tell their parents, "Don’t have a cow." And Mom and Dad take it literally. It seems no one keeps a cow anymore.

In days past when we kept the milk in the cow instead of the refrigerator, milking began and ended each day. A farm kid who grew up far from the convenience store was the closest thing a family had to a "milking machine." Such a child learned valuable lessons from old Bossy; that five o’clock came twice in the same 24-hour period, that you should keep your mouth shut while working, and that you should never approach anything from the rear. A child who milked learned important things ... like responsibility and how to shoot a milky stream into the cat’s mouth from a distance of 10 feet. Those who milked seldom partied all night.

In the nineties a child’s chores consist of turning off the TV, and kids think the basic food groups are the can, the bottle and the fast food drive-up window. They are under the impression that milk expires according to a date on a carton. A farm kid knew that milk expired when the family cow did, so they took good care of her. In the "days of dairy," a child could learn as much by sticking his head into the flank of a cow as between the covers of a book. But now we have urban-bred teachers who ask stupid questions like ... "How much milk does a cow give?" Any well-educated farm kid knows that a cow doesn’t GIVE you anything. You have to go get it ... at the most inconvenient times, too.

In a simpler era you could easily identify those who had grown up sitting on a milk stool by shaking their hand. It’s not something you can fake, lie about or water down. Either you have drained a cow’s crankcase or you haven’t. And you’d better not lie about it, because you may be asked to do it, and just like opening a modern day milk carton, it requires a certain knack that takes time to master.

When Bossie was BOSS, the cow was an honored member of the family. We thanked God for our daily bread and the cow for freshly squeezed milk. Now an entire generation thinks ice cream comes from two aging hippies named Ben and Jerry. Today’s industrial strength cow is milked for all she’s worth, forced to give up her calf so that an ungrateful human may bottle feed and not be inconvenienced. The cow gets credit only for global warming and hardened arteries.

The family milk cow has been replaced by 2000-head dairies where we let others do our milking for us. The result is that there are 2000 more kids who sleep late every morning. "Butter" has been replaced by "oleomargarine," our milkshakes contain no milk, exercise substitutes for hard work, and politicians substitute for real leaders. We elect bureaucrats who know how to milk a taxpayer but not a cow. And we send our kids off to teachers who don’t know which end of the cow the hay goes in, how many faucets a cow has, or how to turn them on. But they are telling our kids how the cow ate the cabbage.

Personally, I don’t consider any person truly educated unless they have tried to coax a little mother’s milk from the udder of one of God’s greatest creatures in the early morning darkness.