"F*** the Government"

[_honorentheos]

Interesting thing happened today. My daughter and I were watching the documentary The Hacker Wars on Netflix after lunch. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4047350/) After it was over, I asked her what she thought the take-away was from it. She said, "“F” the government."

I told her that wasn't what I got from it. She tossed out a few other things, and then I said, "I think what stood out to me is that every one of the main people in the doc had first hacked their own education and learned to think for themselves."

She was kinda quiet, so I got my copy of The Stranger by Camus, handed it to her, and said, "Homework." She's been reading it for the last half hour so that's promising.

Curious where it goes. My library was built for the revolution of independent thinking I wish I'd pursued education in at a much younger age instead of being filled with all the complacent, convention stuff I bought into especially as I moved into mission age and the years after. Maybe she'll be interested enough to be young enough to do more with it than just be an old crank like me. But then again, it's one of those questions about not directing, just making available and discussing that I'm trying to be good at as a parent. We'll see.

ETA: In follow-up conversation, we ended up discussing the book and why it might be relevant to the question of how society treats conformity or failure to behave certain ways. And Camus. The movie itself came up again in the same context as Blackfish which we had watched a while back. That being, that developing critical thinking skills should mean questioning what any source wants you to believe and not just accepting the message because it creates an emotional response. Especially when it creates one you WANT to believe is true in terms of having a strong feeling the source is right and their target is everything they claim it to be. But also not hiding from information that doesn't, on the face of it, conform to one's innate preferences just because it sounds like it might say something you disagree with. A nice Sunday. Better than Church for sure.