Our child minder, Juliette, shared a Swazi saying with my mother, some 65 years ago: "To bring up a boy is like taming a lion. But he has to be tamed in such a way that he remains a lion." 

I remembered this with amusement a few years ago when we introduced my grandson, then about three, to some pretty girls at a horse show. He growled at them! The poor creatures gave a pale smile and found somewhere else to be. Clearly he needed to work at his relationships. 

I recently watched a YouTube video on the stories we tell children. The presenter, Colin Stokes, makes a case for the film industry stereotyping the role of women in story telling, to become passive trophies, while men and boys are portrayed as having to do violent deeds to earn rewards. He compares this to the story of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, where women protagonists win by building teams, by making people better than they think they are, and not by violence.

Should we allow Hollywood to dictate moral standards and values to us? This is one reason why I do not follow television and most films. The moral and ethical qualifications of most of the film industry does not inspire me to follow their example. Let me not be too explicit about people who employ lawyers in bunches of dozens.

A friend who studied our First Nation, the San community in Southern Africa, related how communities would isolate men who were too aggressive. Parents would counsel girls to avoid such unsuitable partners, and the community would, only as a last resort, use violence to dissuade such behavior. They built relationships over centuries without police, law enforcement or threat. Survival depended on societal teamwork.

In the recovery from the current pandemic our societies will have to deal with a lot of stress. Daily news articles evidence that most of us suffer from some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. Countries resort to dictatorial decision-making to face the crises of economic and societal degeneration, nation-wide stress and uncertainty.

Our futures will depend on our ability to form teams, to work together, to share the economies of the world, not by drawing ever-decreasing circles of "us" against "them." Like Dorothy, not Rambo.

But back to our visit: we enjoyed watching the young man playing the big boy, helping his sister, carefully pushing his little cousin on a swing, and gathering the sheep on the farm. No growling this time!