This is an old German hunting knife I recently got for very cheap on a local flea market. Knives like that were popular as youth Knives from the 50s on, and even sold as "Boyscout Knives" in Germany. It was one of my very first fixed blade knives, which I got at the age of five. These knives were the go-to knives for any Outdoor activities that requires a more robust blade. Before bushcraft knives, this is what we used in Germany. We built our forts in the woods with those, prepared wood for the campfire, prepared food, carved sticks and whittled ugly sculptures and made toys and whatever came to our minds. I never left home without a SAK, and most of the time, a fixed blade knife. In school, it sat in my backpack next to my food pack and my lamp. I rarely took it out, except for snacking. I never, not once, drew a knife in anger. Never at all. Instead, it was a means to solve problems, and when there was something that needed cutting, the teacher always found someone who had a tool. For a tool it was. I got mobbed a lot in school and beaten up a lot. I still have the scars. But even this kind of violence never involved any weapon. There were unwritten rules that even the bullies dared not break. You never whacked someone in the face who had glasses on, you stopped when someone was on the ground or bled in a worrying manner, and under no circumstances at all you used weapons. That was elementary school, of course. On Gymnasium, that changed, but those were the bankster kids using knuckle dusters on me. This was in the Eighties. There was a rather subtle shift, almost unintelligible.
Now, according to studies by the WHO, the world suffers from a mental health crisis. There is a significant loss of empathy and creativity worldwide in college students. More than 40% of Brokers suffer from a narcisstic or psychopathic mental disorder, and this holds true for "the upper echelons" in general.
On the other hand, there is a rather worrying process of a drastic increase in anxiety and depression and a drastic decline of empathy and creativity.
It is quite the scientific commonplace to state that Outdoor activities for children can enhance mental health, further creative thinking and empathy. Carving with a knife has been proven a century ago to be beneficial for the development of children, and taking responsibility and indulging in social activities like Scouting, Camping and Woodcraft furthers empathy and creative thinking.
It is only logical that we ban and stigmatize a knife, especially and explicitly stated for children in an educational setting.
Not.
So, this raises questions. There are a legion of studies linking a narcisstic or psychopathic mental disorder to hyperconsumerism. As an example, please see:
Narcisstic mental disorder is linked to materialism and the symbolic value of status symbols. Now narcissm in Leaders is quite a commonplace nowadays. And in order to maintain a system of civil obedience that is based upon trained helplessness in times of crisis, you need to take away the capability to solve problems from the broad populace. I postulate that the decline of empathy and creativity is manufactured, not by all Leaders per se, but by political and economical leaders, mostly, but not exclusively so, from the far right and far left.
The harsh reality is, making a kid understand why a tool is a tool, takes time, empathy and patience that most parents nowadays do not have, and cannot have, because they read silly pamphlets on blogs getting political about beautiful knives😉, but, more probably so, because they need to work three jobs to pay rent and/or mortgage. And they need to because high property prices are manufactured to control. If kids do not learn responsibility and creativity around tools, hey presto, they are incapacitated to think creatively, effectively creating a slave caste. And do not call me comrade, because the commies are just as bad as the far right assholes. As are some centre politicians. Because it is not a matter of a political orientation any more, but of a mental disorder diagnosed by leading scientists. The implications are grave. We currently experience a loss of democracy worldwide. And I cannot emphasize enough that this is not due to just one party, politicians or even the super rich (although a lot of them are supposedly stark raving pissed mad). It is a global mental disorder. We are going conkers. We know that our economy, our society and culture are at stake and maybe dysfunctional. Our Planet can sustain a system of sustenance at the moment and nothing more.
And the solution is not to buy a Tesla.
The solution, if there is solution any at all in the first, is gardening, farming, foraging, making and repairing. What now would we need for that?
Community, cooperation and creativity, and above all, empathy and the will to take responsibility. To care for the elderly, the unfortunate, the weak. Not because someone told us, but out of an intrinsic motivation.
To achieve this, we need to stop this shit.
Teach your kids how to carve, how to garden and make things. They should be able to identify plants rather than know the disgusting stories that narcisstic assholes aka celebrities tell about themselves.
A rant, you might say. Also, noone is capable of living in the Mesolithic, you might say.
Because you are told (and do not get me wrong, I fall for it myself most days) that we have to go back, and far.
This knife is presumeably from the Fifties. The blade is older, because Fred Mac Overland used old blanks from before the war at first (1920s-1930s), but it was in the Fifties, Sixties up to the late Eighties, that those knives were quite commonplace, especially as youth knives. Production rates skyrocketed first in WWI and then again in WWII and ever since. In business promotion you calculate a minimum growth of pure profit p.a. of 300% in order to even stay in the game. Just so you get the picture.
Actually, postulating infinite growth in a very finite system is necessarily leading to collapse in physics. If you put a high pressure pump to a bicycle tyre and do not stop, the tyre will explode. There is no "but" or "if", it does. Infinite cell growth in your body, aka cancer, will kill you sooner or later.
Growing anyway in a finite world is the ideology of a cancer cell. 98% of all money is bound in the Portfolios of 3% of the world populace. The money just isn't free, so there is little to no chance that common Joe can earn it. The fact is concealed, whether on purpose or not, I cannot say, and I need not say, by printing money and generating fictional value assets. Again, not everything that happens must necessarily happen because of some sinister world conspiracy. And please do not get me wrong: I suck at economics, so I might get the details wrong.
The frightening thing is, that it doesn't matter. There is a culture war of some raving madmen who simply want to impose their own hubris on the majority of people.
I cannot put it any other way. I cannot put it politely, and it sucks. And well, there is no such thing as a "deep state" or "reptiloid elites". Just a small group of people gone completely conkers and who are so powerful that they shit on law and order or contributing to society. What they do, however, is buying media. Follow the flow of money and you get my meaning. The really frightening facts about climate change are definitively NOT a scam. But if we are talking about depriving e.g. Standing Rock Reservation (wopíla was'te, Piymayelo was'te aikiçitan, tunkasíla kiçi'un!) of water rights in the name of some weird notion of sustainability, well, you do not need some weirdo's blog to tell that this might be a bit bold. Or depriving the Sáami of herding rights because of the claim their herding economy were not sustainable (they have done so for at least 3000 years and the Tundra depends on the reindeer for ecological balance. I call bs and I am not the only one.
Fact is, in the last half of a year I signed a petition against one or the other kind of assault on civic and human rights almost every week, at the most five petitions per week. I wrote a shiteload of letters to politicians. It keeps one in a constant state of agitation and will eventually burn you out, and it is designed that way. Because it is warfare we experience. It is a culture war.
It is not fought with weapons, and you are not the enemy. You are not even prey. You are meat in the larder, cultivated for the harvest. And there is little you can do against it. Not every politician is a criminal, but those who are, are working highly efficiently.
They have proactively destroyed the educational system in Germany and progressively cut back on funding in the social care and healthcare sector. There is a well-documented correlation between poverty, lack of education, and lack of social integration and perspective. Social violence is a reality.
Noone in their right mind would start a knife fight or see a knife as a weapon. But the kids cannot possibly be in their right mind. Successful psychopaths become top managers or political authorities (sources: Time magazine et al), less intelligent psychopaths become felons.
This knife comes from a time before the rise of hyperconsumerism and Miltoenesque capitalistic Religion. The cultural context and its implications were rather wholesome. Kids were encouraged to climb trees, read books and reenact their content. They camped, learned to build shacks in the woods, built dams and in spite of breaking one or the other bone, they developed a rather healthy outlook on life and its natural boundaries. They were able to act out energy and relieve stress. And, contrary to popular beliefs, they rarely hurt themselves or others with a knife, in spite of the knives being razor sharp and pointy. I am not advocating educational violence, but the parents nowadays simply have no time or attention-availability to firmly lead the kids through situations with difficult orientational challenges. It is not only the parents 's fault, because our society doesn't generate a safe environment for raising kids. In fact, it is toxic as to creating a sustainable future.
The elephant in the room is, that this toxic environment is artificed by political forces. Those manipulate the populace in order to create profit for the very few, and, consequentially, themselves. One cannot possibly expect them to honestly even try to solve the problems, which are undoubtedly existent. Because their agendas would fail with a populace of responsible citizens that could care for themselves. Because their self-image is that of power, fear, greed and control. Noone wants kids that are asking creative questions or citizens that think for themselves, because our system of hyperconsumerism would collapse without trained helplessness, as I said countless times. There is a lot of talk of sustainability, but most of it is the aforementioned greenwashing.
That knife is 70 years old. If it would get banned, I would most certainly have to destroy it. One doesn't need to be a clairvoyant in order to suppose that it is only a matter of time. Mrs. Faeser, Federal Minister Of Homeland Security tried to establish thought crime as felony, proposes the reversal of the assumption of innocence and total surveillance via AI.
(https://www.cicero.de/innenpolitik/attacken-bundesregierung-rechtsordnung-lisa-paus-nancy-faeser, https://www.cicero.de/kultur/nancy-faeser-spd-terrorismus-bka-wohnungsdurchsuchungen)
As I have made clear, this is possibly antidemocratic. And it is not even trying to be sustainable or even effective, because it doesn't target the root of the problem and doesn't even try.
It sucks, because this is our life now. They try to destroy democracy, we try to fight them. They own the media, though, and it is only a matter of time that the majority of protesters will get numbed and muffled.
On a more positive note, the mere existence of such a knife is very good news. To me, as you might know by now, it is not a weapon. It is conveying meaning and sustainability in a world gone conkers. Every time I use such a knife, fond memories are coming up, of childhood adventures, of loong and beautiful hikes with my father through woods that were denser and wilder (or so it seemed), of carving hiking sticks from hazel, a ritual my father and I did at the beginning of every longer hike. Of shacks my pals and I built in the woods, dangerous treehouses 25m above the ground, sitting in the crown of a spruce tree, gently caressed by the wind and the perfume of resin. Of dams and forts we built, and campfires where we spent whole evenings without even talking, but understanding each other without words. Of toys we made, of bows from hazel and arrows without fletching, of sunlight through the leaves and hot cocoa after a snowstorm outing on skis.
They do not want to just take the knives from you. Not just the memories. They want to destroy the possibility for you to make such memories. They want to destroy your mental health, and your soul.
Do not become violent. They are just waiting for you to go off your rocker in order to further diminish your freedom. Protest is still possible in a democratic way.
Do not talk with them on informal terms. Do not help them. Do not believe them. Do not sell them bread nor wine. Do not care about them. That is not to say that you should demonize or dehumanize them. Stay kind to everyone, to yourself, to the last seven generations and to the next seven generations. I am not saying you should wish them any harm. Not force opposes the darkness. Light does.
Make memories for yourself, your family and your kids. Take the Smartphone out of their hands and put it aside, and fill their hands with the jewels of reality. It is obviously bad if they break a bone. Teach them responsibility and realistic caution, and it might not happen. But it is far worse if they are not allowed to go and test their limits.
Teach them limits yourself. Of course, if you put a knife in their hands, they will injure themselves. Given that they hopefully do not damage something crucial, you can see that as an opportunity. It hurts to cut yourself, and when the tears have dried and the wound is better, then is the time to talk to them what went wrong. Not earlier. Also, you need to make them never to forget that they can still do it, that it is worth it, that pain is a part of life, and the only way to make it bearable is care and help for others and carry on, maybe in a different manner.
As always, the solution is kindness and resilience. They do not care about children. But they are not immortal. Repair the mess we have created, and, yes, it is not "us vs. them". We are all a part of it as well.
Make fond memories. Memories that can warm your kids when they will have to deal with bankster or politician scum or get whacked with life's blunt end, and that can warm yourself when your treeclimbing times are over. The world is a very beautiful and awe-inspiring place. It is a huge and great adventure, even if you never left your tiny village. These adventures are free. And if you create a place in your mind and soul from adventures and memories, you would even be free yourself if they succeed to establish a real-life dystopian hellscape.
Take care and all the best!
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