Choosing Our Cage

There’s something to be said about a person willfully remaining within their cage when the means of escape are before them.

I shared the video of the honey badger that keeps finding his freedom again and again with the title “Be the Honey Badger” and here I sit bitching and moaning about the cage I find myself in, possessing real means of escaping.

I am not the honey badger.

He even left his friend, for freedom.

Instead, I chose to remain, comfortably within my cage.

This is not to say the cage isn’t wrong. It is wrong. Terribly wrong. One of the greatest evils on Earth. But for now its a tolerable evil, I suppose.

Not so for some.

If my kid was having epileptic seizures, remaining in a place that banned medicinal marijuana would not be tolerable. I’d leave that cage for a slightly better one.

And there it is. All we can really do is leave one cage only to find ourselves within another. For now I tolerate the cage I’m in, finding new ways to improve my life and the lives of my loved ones, taking ever more advances in pushing out the walls of my cage, and hoping my bitching and moaning will influence enough other people that they’ll shrug off their rulers and raise their kids as peaceful parents and radical unschoolers.

Save as PDFPrint

Written by 

Founder and editor of Everything-Voluntary.com and UnschoolingDads.com, Skyler is a husband and unschooling father of three beautiful children. His writings include the column series “One Voluntaryist’s Perspective” and “One Improved Unit,” and blog series “Two Cents“. Skyler also wrote the books No Hitting! and Toward a Free Society, and edited the books Everything Voluntary and Unschooling Dads. You can hear Skyler chatting away on his podcasts, Everything Voluntary and Thinking & Doing.