Oh, goody, I just saw a TV commercial for another reality show. This show is about large company CEOs who decide they each want to get an idea of what their most basic employees do every day. Other reality shows include swapping wives, bachelors seeking dates, farmers looking for wives, and women looking for publicity. On the right show, you can voted off an island, or have a team come in to your extremely messy and cluttered home to help you clean it up and get organized. There is a married couple who actually had eight children and made their family a reality show that ended up with the parents divorcing and the children being used as pawns. Or you could work at a job and be publicly fired on national TV. Don’t these all sounds like fun, inspiring programs?
To tell the truth the only one I’ve actually seen for a few minutes is the house cleaning team at work. It’s easy to see they are fake, scripted and not spontaneous as they purport to be. The story lines are not believable. It has to be staged that way.
If you want to truly experience reality, contact a rancher and inquire when her calving season will be in full swing. Our son started in mid-January. If the weather turn extremely cold again, , we will have some very hard realities…calving when it’s below zero. When a calf is born during cold weather, we say it’s much like a person stepping out of a warm bathtub and going out onto the cold ground. It is not unlike being a member of the Polar Bear Club, but it’s not just for fun, it is for life. If a little calf can get right up and suckle, and the mamma cow “mothers” it, then usually all is well.
When we owned cows, in our operation if a calf got chilled, I preferred to have him brought into my kitchen where I had room to work, and was warm and comfortable myself as the cold calf came any time of the day or night. We placed him on a blanket, rubbed him down with towels and warmed him with a hand held hair dryer. Stimulating the blood flow and warming the calf was the goal. How do I know when a calf is ready to go back to his momma in the cow pen? Iput a hand into his mouth to see if his mouth temperature is warm. If the mouth was still cold, he was not ready to leave the warmth of our home and I kept loving on him.
On a note further from home, US troops are involved in the most crucial reality shows in the world. They are not scripted nor trumped up; they are life and death realities. We need to keep them in our hearts and prayers.
Peggy is a national-award winning columnist who writes from the farm in southwest South Dakota. Her internet latchstring is always out at peggy@peggysanders.com