When my oldest son was three, he had recurring bear nightmares.
So he came to me and said, “Dad, could you fight a bear?”
And I said, “Of course I could. Humans fight bears all the time. We kill many, many bears, and very rarely does a bear ever kill a human, so we almost always win.”
“And you are stronger than an average person, Dad, so it would be even easier for you,” Levi said.
And I said in response, “Well, I would hope to have a gun if I were going to fight a bear. But you know, our ancestors did not have guns.
Long, long ago, our ancestors fought and killed bears much bigger than the bears today.
Cave bears.
They were huge and very aggressive, and they lived all over Europe in caves. And that is also where our ancestors liked to live. And they killed these bears with only sticks with a sharp rock at the end.
Can you imagine that?
Now I want you to imagine that you live back in that time, and there is a beautiful, warm cave that you want to sleep in. And it protects us from the winter. But we cannot sleep there because there is a cave bear inside.
So what do we do?
We light a fire at the entrance, and we smoke the bear out. And when the bear comes out of the smoke, you and me and the other men of the tribe stab the bear with our big spears.
But the bear’s fur is so tough that the stabs do not necessarily penetrate. So we have to keep trying together, and we all work as a team, and we fight the bear until we finally get a good stab in.
And it bleeds out and dies.
And now we have beaten the bear.
And we celebrate, and we skin the bear, and we put its skin as a bed in the cave.
And its skull as a trophy of the tribe, to show that we are brave.
Just imagine being part of that.”
Interestingly, shortly after, he stopped having bear nightmares.
You should tell your kids stories, especially ones that are based on reality. Tell your kids about their ancestors’ heroic deeds.
Turns out a fun thing to do at the bar is offer drunk people to hit my vape at which point I present my olight to them, which they invariably try to suck on. Then you turn it on and make their cheeks glow and everyone can see but them.
Get lightning bugged, idiot.