A Good Bar of Soap

As a child my family and I would make an annual trek to Las Vegas to visit my grandparents.

My Grandma Dorothy was a really, really tough woman. Her husband died at the young age of 45 of a heart attack, leaving her to raise five children by herself.

)She smoked, drank, ate with her feet on the table, ran a daycare out of her home (clearly there were less regulations at this time) and was one of my very favorite people in the whole world.

A couple of the boys in the daycare were actually my naughty cousins. I remember a particular visit when my cousins were misbehaving terribly and Grandma had warned them that they better stop with their potty talk or she was going to “wash their mouth out with soap.”

They continued and she gave them a little scrub-a-dub-dub of the oral region. They knew the impending consequence for continued disobedience, they chose to challenge grandma’s authority and she followed through with her behavioral modification plan. I’ve never used this particular soap technique on my own children, but the process of following up with consequences is imperative in our home.

This needs to be imperative in a few more homes. My cowboy and I actually found a way to safely deposit the cowpokes with other loved ones and he took me out on a date.

As we stopped to fuel up the vehicle there were three young boys (we will call them that as they have not earned the right to be called men despite meeting the age to drive) that were enjoying a summer evening with the top pulled back on the convertible loudly listening to the radio.

The vulgarity that was being broadcasted from their vehicle was appalling. There were two elderly gentlemen filling up at the same time. I could see the disappointment in their eyes. They looked at these boys simply frustrated with America’s youth. I saw the temperature of my cowboy’s blood begin to rise and he walked with a purpose over to these young fellas and gave them a “mouth-washing.” They listened. They needed someone to help them discover this idea long before that moment at the gas station.

As I’ve pondered the chaos of America I think one of our problems is we stopped using a good bar of soap to clean things up. When a bar of soap was used we really had to scrub and lather to get something clean.

The friction created from rubbing the bar back and forth is part of what actually helped kill the microorganisms. We went from a bar of soap to liquid soap to foaming soap to hand sanitizer to foaming hand sanitizer.

To me it seems like we have been in a downward spiral of laziness. When the world ran out of soap I seriously thought, how in the world have people been cleaning their hands prior to this?

There are messes everywhere. Riots. Protests. Vulgarity. First, it is vital that parents start raising kids to understand that there are consequences for their actions. Second, it is time to get out a good ‘ol bar of soap and start doing some scrubbing…on our hearts…on our cities…on our nation.