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Do you know someone who does not mind giving away free music? According to the music industry that idea is just stupid. Someone should always be squeezing profit out of music.
I know my cousin Jon does not mind giving out some music from time to time. He gave me a whole tape’s worth of MP3 music from his band Bus Gas. I loved it. A good chap, that cousin of mine is.
Another group that likes to give out free music is the birds. The ones in the trees. The ones that sing as you are walking through the woods. Sometimes I pay the birds for their music though. I pay them a convenience fee for coming to my house to sing by putting bird seed out. Sometimes I feed the ducks at a pond too. The genre they play is called waddle-hop.
I like the idea of pay it forward or sideward or upward or whatever-ward-you-want-ward. The way I do not like payment is through IOUs that come with restrictions and allow for hording and inflating and holding fees and expenditures. Those sorts of payment are just really no good. They seem to create inequalities and authorities and junk.
I suppose the point of this post is that I do not think that I have done anything for my cousin in awhile and I probably owe him a pack of cigarettes or something. He is always the type of guy who is as giving as anyone can be. And I cannot recall the last time I did a favor for him.
Shucks.
From time to time, my 3-year-old son will whine about how he wants something. Something like, “I want to watch Cars!” or “I want some candy!” or something else he does not really need.
My standard response has become, “I want world peace.” At first he was taken aback by this response. Now he tends to go bug mom about his want instead.
I choose that response because it shows that the words “I want” are not some pair of magic words that can make anything happen. I thought it would help illustrate that we can get what we want, but we have to work for it. Even working at something we want a whole lifetime does not mean we will get what we want. People have been working on world peace in some incarnation or another since there was ever the realization that there is a world that we all have to find a way to exist on without killing each other off. Sure, some ideas of attaining that goal have often been, and continue to be killing off anyone who does not agree with their own goals, but the idea I was trying to instill is that we have to work at things instead of merely wishing for them.
A couple of times my response was, “I want a million dollars.” I am sure I used it only because I heard someone else use it as a response to their child’s wants. Perhaps even my own parents used it on me a few times. I stopped using it because I quickly realized that while I could use a million dollars, I could do better. At worst I would get selfish, lazy, and completely lack any motivation to think. I like thinking. At best, I would probably use it to make sure that my and my family’s lives were stable, then invest or donate the rest to the stability of other human lives. That would be great, but not as good as world peace. World peace is something for everyone, and I like that, even if it may not be possible anytime in the near future for our species. As long as I am picking one thing that I want, I may as well be idealistic.
It may not seem to make much sense to use this response with my 3-year-old. While he certainly grasps the concept of wanting things, he just gets confused about the world peace part. We were looking up in the sky at the moon one night and asked my wife and I were Earth was. Obviously he is still getting a handle on the fact that we live on one of many planets. We have not even started working on the concept of peace!
I am going to continue to use it though. He mostly dismisses it as that confusing thing that dad says, but it sinks in little by little. He does attempt to get clarification sometimes. Eventually it will make sense. At the very least, it stops him from whining for the time being and he finds something else to work on that he can attain without magic words or gives him a chance to rephrase his want into a request which he can negotiate.
