I like that one little trite saying that gets repeated often enough to lose meaning; If you give a man a fish you feed him for a day, if you teach him to fish you feed him for life. Like other sayings people find a way of being mean about it, like they aren’t ever sure whether they are beating their plowshares in swords or swords into plowshares.
It’s not always practical to teach a guy to fish; sometimes you have too much shit going on, but you have a spare fish. It’d be hard to put that on a bumpersticker, If you give a man a fish … except when you have a spare fish and you don’t have the time, it’s better to give the guy something to eat then it is a platitude.
Sometimes it’s not practical to teach a guy to fish at all, I mean, say the guy is from the desert and he just happened to be near your river, I mean he is a grown ass man who doesn’t know how to fish, there could be a good reason for it, somehow he’s made it this far without your intervention.
You might even be insulted yourself if whatever motherfucker taught you how to fish was self-righteous about the shit, like he or she saved you from starving which would have surely been your fate in the master fish sen-sei hadn’t come along to teach you the zen of hooking a fishes lip.
You move a bit past fishing, as such things are supposed too, and it stops working even at the adequate level it was working. I mean some shit you really have to learn on your own. INo, no one has to reinvent the rod and reel every damn time, but, getting food into your mouth is pretty basic, and if the only thing stopping a motherfucker from eating is not knowing how to fish … well, you must be living in a parable. For instance, and just off the top of my head, knowing how to fish doesn’t prevent the river bullies from beating you up daily for your fish money.
I’m not saying if you teach a man to fish you best teach him how to fight as well, if the world worked just a tad different I’d insist the opposite were true, I’m just saying, your investment in teaching a guy to fish has to have some limits and a clear understanding that this one small act of kindness and your time and energy is just one small act of your kindness and time and it’d be nice if he paid it forward and/or gave a hungry motherfucker a fish from time to time, but that it’s very clear that you really haven’t fixed all his issues.
Still, sitting right in the middle of that lovely little gesture is the plain fact that dude seemed to have made it to adulthood without you or your mad fishing skills. Maybe it took a whole village to raise the motherfucker. And, the way the whole village did it was by taking turns giving him a fish. I don’t know. Villages get like that sometimes. Villages also have village idiots, town drunks, and sometimes pedophiles or clergy or other things, that, well, make you regret using a whole village instead of just a good set of parents, or at least one good, or even a guardian ad litum who wasn’t an idiot, drunk, clergy or pedophile. The town idiot/pedophile incidentally doesn’t get absolved by teaching the kid how to fish. Imagine, if you will, dude hanging out by the candy cart “Hey, kid, want some candy? How bout I show you how to get all the salty candy of the sea you could ever want whenever you wanted it?” See what I mean?
I’m not telling you don’t teach a man to fish, though, or even stop using the phrase or that the phrase has no merit. I probably am not inclined to tell you what I am doing, just saying; the world isn’t all that complicated but it’s a bit more complicated than is going to be solved by teaching a guy how to fish.
As many will attest too, it’s not the fishing part that’s hard, some folks can’t manage to gore the worm without horking, or cast a fly well, and, most frequently, when it comes to the gutting and the filleting a number of would be fishers start thinking they might not make such bad vegetarians. Again, bad for bumpersticker --- If you give a man a fish … teach him to fish … shit, maybe corn is a better idea.
I saw a hummer yesterday with the “my boss is a jewish carpenter” sticker and the “Real men Love Jesus” sticker, the latter would have added coolness points if it meant the driver defended gay rights, but you get the feeling, perhaps my own prejudice, that a guy with those stickers on 60k of fossil fuel sucking Hummer probably isn’t active in civil liberties causes. Why is this paragraph even in here? Um, cause Jesus hung out with fishers, cause if he really like, I don’t know, made shelves or chairs or something, they would so be on eBay or a vault in the Vatican, or, more likely than not, there’d be a lot of knock offs allegedly made by Jesus.
And sure, there’s a lot of carpentry work, like a framing a wall, that doesn’t leave a useful artifact, but did have a bunch of guys following him around writing shit down, you’d think there’d be some mention of some kind of carpentry work. Best as I can recall, it was Jesus’s dad, no, not that one, the other one, who was a carpenter and yeah, usually the kid went into the old mans business and shit, but shit, usually a grown ass man who likes fish has already learned how to fish or at least cop a fish. I’m just saying … if in the middle there was a What Would Jesus Drive, I’m guessing Hummer doesn’t pop up all that often.
Ok, I actually have shit to do. Fish amongst yourselves.
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