A cowboy named Bud was overseeing his herd in a remote mountainous pasture in California when suddenly a brand-new BMW advanced toward him out of a cloud of dust.

The driver, a young man in a Brioni suit, Gucci shoes, RayBan sunglasses and YSL tie, leaned out the window and asked the cowboy, “If I tell you exactly how many cows and calves you have in your herd, Will you give me a calf?”

Bud looks at the man, obviously a yuppie, then looks at his peacefully grazing herd and calmly answers, “Sure, Why not?”

The yuppie parks his car, whips out his Dell notebook computer, connects it to his Cingular RAZR V3 cell phone, and surfs to a NASA page on the Internet, where he calls up a GPS satellite to get an exact fix on his location which he then feeds to another NASA satellite that scans the area in an ultra-high-resolution photo.

The young man then opens the digital photo in Adobe Photoshop and exports it to an image processing facility in Hamburg, Germany. Within seconds, he receives an email on his Palm Pilot that the image has been processed and the data stored. He then accesses an MS-SQL database through an ODBC connected Excel spreadsheet with email on his Blackberry and, after a few minutes, receives a response.

Finally, he prints out a full-color, 150-page report on his hi-tech, miniaturized HP LaserJet printer, turns to the cowboy and says, “You have exactly 1,586 cows and calves.”

“That’s right. Well, I guess you can take one of my calves,” says Bud.

He watches the young man select one of the animals and looks on with amusement as the young man stuffs it into the trunk of his car.
Then Bud says to the young man, “Hey, if I can tell you exactly what your business is, will you give me back my calf?”

The young man thinks about it for a second and then says, “Okay, why not?”

“You’re a Congressman for the U.S. Government”, says Bud.

“Wow! That’s correct,” says the yuppie, “but how did you guess that?”

“No guessing required.” answered the cowboy.

“You showed up here even though nobody called you; you want to get paid for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked. You used millions of dollars worth of equipment trying to show me how much smarter than me you are; and you don’t know a thing about how working people make a living – or about cows, for that matter. This is a herd of sheep.

Now give me back my dog.

Here’s a little true tale I’ll call The custodian and the ditcher.

Walking back to class during my planning period I just spied a student being read the riot act… by the school’s custodian. It was an African American man speaking to an African American teen telling him about how “he needed to get to class, grab onto this chance for school” while giving him a heads up as to how there are just a whole “mess of people that want to simply turn kids like him into little gang bangers that’ll end up doin’ time — cause there’s a whole lot of folks that make good money off of that in this country, both the gangs and the government.”

I had to smile. I mean how often is it that we devalue what it is that our “non-teaching” adults on campus can bring to the table when it comes to the quest of educating kids? For years I have said that the security guards, the school lunch personnel and so on would love to be asked to do more than merely clean the garbage or scoop out the corn kernels and plop them on lunch trays.

Yet we don’t ask. And we don’t empower. And we don’t trust. The fact is, school employees, for the most part, LIKE KIDS (at least as much as teachers do, LOL) and would love to lend their wisdom and insights if only they were empowered to do so.

My feeling is that it’s a great waste of our natural resources that we do not ask more of the people who would be quite willing to do more. Just because a person is a school custodian is no reason not to believe that this person can’t also be an educational ally.

And when it comes right down to it, don’t you think that the conversation I just heard came from a man who had a small degree of credibility to speak about the matter? Heck, maybe even more so than myself.

For those who wonder why we need Sex Ed taught in our schools, I offer this story, the tale of the teens who mistook a woman’s lovemaking cries for assault and promptly beat the crap out of the man with whom she was amorously copulating.

But the question arises as to which school personnel are qualified to handle such a delicate, senstive class. Good thing we have teachers such as this person, the elementary educator who “accidentally” spliced in a few seconds of her own sex adventures in a take home DVD of school memories for the kids to relish.

You gotta wonder what the summer project was, dontchya?

At the end of the day, all I know is, it’s a good thing we have stable leadership in this country — as this person clearly personifies. Otherwise, who knows where we’d be.

(Caribou Barbie… where do they make this stuff up?)

But sex ed wouldn’t just be about the birds and the bees. We could teach hygiene, personal responsibility and how to properly circumcise yourself, a lesson most obviously needed as this man proves when he uses a set of nail clippers to do a job most certainly requiring shears.

Is this not a textbook definition of the old saying, “Never send a boy to do a man’s job.”

Procreation: We need the pros.

I try not to be a hysteric about the demise of our nation’s young men because it’s almost trite to moan about it. And the truth is, I must admit that when I was a “young man” people were most certainly wringing their hands over me.

(Not that they still aren’t but hey, old habits die hard, right? LOL!)

Like all teens, however, I had role models, people who played a large role in my own sense of identity — even though I had never met them. And being that I love sports, I must admit that there were some star athletes who literally shaped the framework of my own self-perception during that era of my life.

Today our young men do much the same thing. This brings me to LeBron James.

Look, I like LeBron. He’s an amazing basketball player, a apparently good-hearted guy and quite an engaging personality.

But last week when his team lost in their quest for the championship he walked off the court without shaking hands with his opponents. Claims he was too much of a competitor to do such a thing.

I saw this in Yahoo sports and just basically had to copy and paste it. LeBron was wrong. This writer excellently explains why.

(NOTE: I can find the source material on this article as I copied it late at night. But these words below are not mine — they are just spot on and well worth repeating — so I pinched them from the article, and I’d gladly credit the writer if I knew where I got it from.)

“I’m a competitor,” LeBron said. “That’s what I do. It doesn’t make sense to me to go over and shake somebody’s hand.”

But so many athletes are now cut from that cloth. They think the inability to deal with defeat gracefully is a sign of competitive fire, when it’s often a sign of immaturity. A real competitor gives every ounce of effort to win, but is enough of a man to give respect to an opponent who does the same and prevails.

How dead-on is this writer? I just love this line…

They think the inability to deal with defeat gracefully is a sign of competitive fire, when it’s often a sign of immaturity. A real competitor gives every ounce of effort to win, but is enough of a man to give respect to an opponent who does the same and prevails.

Whereas the spirit of competition, the nobility and the passion for sport, used to be the driving force behind the games (well, at least in Greek times), now, the game is all about who wins as if the means justify the ends. (See Dick Cheney and the torture argument for how this twisted thinking extrapolates into warped perceptions during adulthood.)

Are our young men more adrift than they were when I was a kid or am I just more attuned to what is a constant adriftness in young men during this era of their lives now that I am a bit more long in the tooth?

I’d be lying if I did not acknowledge being troubled by the stuff that is going on these days with young men. I mean, holy friggin’ smokes, earlier in the week I had a student tell me she was sexually assaulted by 3 boys on our campus. Now when I was a teen, I was most certainly a hell-raiser. But rape? Gimme a break. My moral compass might have been askew but it hadn’t been completely amputated from my conscience.

What is up these days? And more importantly, is there anything more I/we can to to help fix it.