The Imperative of Asking “Why?"

A few days ago, I found myself at the dentist’s office discussing my son’s wisdom teeth. From the x-rays taken last summer, you could see them coming in strong and straight. The doctor asked me if I wanted to take them out. I asked, “Why?”

“Because that’s what we do.”

I have a lot of quirks, but one of them is the instant desire to do the opposite of anything suggested merely because it’s, “what we do.” The moment I hear those words, I probe further.

“Well,” I said. “Why do we do it?”

“Because there isn’t always room in the mouth for this set of teeth.”

“Does my son have enough room?”

“Yes.”

“Will they come in straight?”

“Yes.”

“Then why should we remove them?”

Pause. Smile. Finally, “Because they’re hard to clean. Keeping them healthy will require good dental care.”

“Don’t we need good dental care to keep all our teeth healthy?”

Still smiling, “Of course.”

I turned to my son and said, “It seems that if you want to keep your wisdom teeth, you’ll need to take care of them.” Which is exactly what’s called for to keep any of our teeth.

“Because that’s what we do.” There’s a lot of this in the world. So many systems, customs, conventions and procedures that we put up with simply because we don’t bother to ask why. Why do we have only two political parties? Why do we only allow marriage in pairs rather than trios or more? Why do we circumcise our sons? Why do we need to take a dozen standardized tests to get into college? Why are bombing Syria? Why is marijuana illegal? Why do we have single sex bathrooms?

Children always ask why and are often told to stop asking. To that I ask, why? Why do we tell our children to stop asking the only question that really matters in this world? Why is vital to learning. You can memorize something, but unless you ask why, you don’t own it. To ask why and then follow the path to the answer is learning at its purest. When my kids ask why, I often reply, “I wonder, I wonder.” Sometimes I give them an answer, other times I just let them wonder.

To ask why is to wonder about the world around you. Those who ask why are often seen as trouble makers, but really these are the change agents. If someone asks you why you do something, and you take the time to answer them, then discussion occurs. And it may very well be that at the end of the day both the questioner and the one being asked the question learn a lot.

Creatives are those who never stop asking why. Even though their parents and teachers might have tried to beat it out of them, they must ask the question often. This is what it means to be curious. Why often leads to how. How would it be to ride on the back of a particle of light? How would it be to live in a building one hundred stories high? How could we build it in a safe and sturdy manner? Then how can lead to what. What would it mean if we could communicate using radio signals? How can we transfer electricity throughout a city? Why do we use fuel that pollutes, and is difficult to mine without hazard, to heat our homes? How could we use the sun, or wind or water? Why do we still keep our account data in regions, like we did back when we were a telephony company, when now we’re a nationwide cable company running on an elegant, seamless fiber optic network? (That last question is for Comcast, who still doesn’t allow the Central Division to have access to customer data in the Western Division even though data by its nature essentially exists everywhere at all times.)

And now, as the Information Age completely threatens to overtake industry and bring us to the next evolution of living on this planet, it becomes even more important for all of us, creators and users alike to ask, WHY???? Because if we don’t, then we’ll find ourselves in a strange hybrid of a civilization where technology is stunted due to our fear and our society is a mess of industrial surfdoms.  And if we wait until then to ask why, we all know the answer will be…

“Because this is what we do.”

YouTube Will Save Civilization

I know, I know. You’re skeptical. YouTube is home to millions of channels, and the most famous and profitable are of young Millennial men and women opening toys or playing video games while you watch.

But bear with me, because I believe that YouTube is the answer to a huge problem we have right now in our world—The lack of reality education.

What do I mean by reality education? I mean Home Economics and Shop. Two classes that until the late eighties were considered mandatory classes for high school students. I call this reality education because these are the skills desperately needed to become an adult: cooking, budgeting, fixing an electrical outlet, building a fence, and yes, learning how to operate a chainsaw.

Some might think I’m being romantic, and I don’t buy into the Home Economics for girls and Shop for boys paradigm. However, in the early eighties most high schools were combining the classes and mixing the sexes. Boys cooked, girls ran chainsaws and all were well on their way to becoming citizens who didn’t have to call a handyman each time there’s a leak in the pipes.

Somehow by the early nineties though, the entire program just went away. Enter in the least handy generations ever…Generation X and Y. The TV handyman character, Red Green, always said, “If the women don’t find you handsome, they better find you handy.” I think this goes for women as well. Most of us don’t know how to change the breaks on our cars or replace the GFI outlets when they go out. We’re also struggling at balancing our daily finances, making budgets and cooking has gone out the window. It seemed like we fell into a dark ages where caring for the home fell into the category of, “Hire someone!” Good for real handymen, but bad for the rest of us.

The end of Home Economics started long before the eighties. In a Huffpost by Brie Dyas it’s suggested that, “The post-World War II landscape presented a challenge for college-level home ec studies. During the Cold War, universities started to defund programs in favor of increasing budgets for science departments. The explosion of convenience foods made from-scratch cooking seem irrelevant. As college-level courses disappeared, those at the high school level lost their cache, as well. As Megan J. Elias writes in "Stir It Up: Home Economics in American Culture," home ec "became associated with dead-end high school classes for girls."

Shop had a similar fate—to be a handyman was a last resort for those who couldn’t be something better. According to Tara Tiger Brown, a contributor for Forbes Magazine, there are real reasons why this happened. Let’s start with California, the pioneer in all things American it seems. She writes that shop and home economics didn’t make the a-g list for the UC when deciding what skills were needed for future Americans.

“The UC/CA State system focuses on theory and not applied skills; a belief that learning how to swing a hammer or understand the difference between a good joint from a bad joint is part of a by-gone era, and as a society these skills are not something to strive for – something people resort to when they are out of options. Looking at shop class in this light is short-sighted and detrimental to America’s future.”

Our fears of being stereotyped has led to a generation of humans who actually don’t feel prepared to care for their homes. Many still live with their parents, even decades after college (that’s another blog all in itself) but for those of us who do create homes of our own, we’ve pretty much had to learn as we go, which until the invention of YouTube, was quite difficult.

Take this perfect example. Just a few weeks ago, our gas fireplace in our bedroom died, just in time for the first winter freeze. The timing couldn’t have been worse. I called the store where we’d purchased the unit and they said their repair team was busy for the next six weeks! They gave me the numbers of some local fireplace repairmen. So I called them and they too were busy for eight to ten days. That’s a long time to sleep in a freezing bedroom. But my husband, being one of the last handy men of his generation, had installed the thing, so I asked the repairman if he could give me a hint of how my husband could fix it. He told me that there were two sensors that needed to be cleaned and gave a description of how to do so, which I passed on to my husband.

A mere five years ago, that would have been it. He would have tried and perhaps figured it out, but perhaps not and then we would have waited eight days until the guy could come to our house to fix it. But my husband had shop and sort of knew his way around. And even better, he searched YouTube and found a video of a guy doing just this repair. All he had to do was search for the model name of the fireplace with the words, “cleaning the sensors.” Voila! Issue fixed and heat was back on in no time.

I went on YouTube and found videos on how to do your laundry, write a check, balance a check book, make a bookshelf, replace a GFI outlet, clean my fireplace, and double ply yarn on a spinning wheel. The amount of information shared by those who know how to do is AMAZING!!! These aren’t famous YouTubers making millions a year. These are men and women who are willing and able to take the time to teach those of us under the age of forty-five how to do the things we need to do to keep the house running. 

In lieu of learning these basic homemaking skills from our parents, or from home economic and shop classes in school, YouTube is our final hope.

I recommend getting on there and taking charge of your education! To start, visit Red Green on YouTube, the best handyman TV show on Earth, and it’ll get you laughing, which is the best way to tackle any problem. For real life problem solvers, I found this list of Nine Great DIY YouTube Channels from Popular Mechanic to be incredibly helpful.

I’m so grateful to these DIY folks and I applaud them. If you’re one of them, please know that you’re appreciated and I honestly think that you’re saving our civilization.

For without you, our homes would fall into ruin…trust me.