Babbling Botkin: "What if My Husband Dies?" - Part Six

Hello, dear readers!

The atmospheric haze of smoke and soot carried from the Western wildfires has reached Michigan over the last week   The first three days reminded me of how the sky looks in very humid summer weather where sky is bright blue overhead and fades to a white-gray along the horizon.  The sun was also haloed when it was overhead.  It felt odd because the humidity is fairly low right now and highs are in the mid-70's so the sky would normally be crisply blue.  

The haze has increased markedly over the last 24 hours.  The light is red-shifted though the day so that direct sunlight between 10am-4pm looks yellow instead of white and the rest of the day has red-orange light instead of yellow light.   Sunrise and sunset has vivid colors - but not the usual set of colors we see.  For a few minutes last night, the western sky was a rose-pink with a red sun.  As the sun rose this morning, it was red until 7:30 in the morning, shifted to orange around 8:30am and finally shifted to yellow-white around 9:30.  The intensity of the sun feels decreased as well.   

We are nearly six minutes into Geoffrey Botkin's discussion of "What If My Husband Dies?".  In the last post, Botkin let a woman with four children know that sharing stories about hallowed ancestors is going to be a critical component of supporting a family if her husband dies.   Needless to say, I'm skeptical of that advice.  

Today, the video dives into the importance of a family-based business led by the father.   Now, every time Botkin talks about business, I immediately replay the scene in "The Muppets' Christmas Carol" where Samuel Eagle lectures a young Scrooge about entering "Business!".     This next quote makes me wonder the exact ages of the letter writer's children:

[00:05:50] Maybe your husband has had some highly developed dreams for the future and you know does your husband leave these to be fulfilled by the boys.  If so, I mean this could be a legacy more valuable than most families realize.  You know, a business plan. A business strategy for things that could be done with the family.  If the dad is taking into account and you are taking into account all the different uh gifts and abilities and talents that each of the young boys have. You know . How can those be kind of woven together to build some kind of a business structure or business idea that works for your family.  

In case anyone was wondering, Geoffrey Botkin has highly developed dreams for his kids.  Botkin himself wasn't able to fulfill those dreams - see the absence of any sons-in-law for more info - but his kids can totally fulfill those dreams over the next two hundred years or so.

Because of that fascinating quirk, Botkin assumes that everyone has sat down and planned out their kids' lives in great detail.  The obvious problem is that 1) not everyone thinks parents should plan  their kids' lives and 2) the plans often fall apart miserably.  

Based on that, I find a detailed plan of a future family business laid out by the dad - but not executed by the dad - to be highly suspect.  That is, in fact, the form of hell that Dorothea Casaubon rejects after her husband dies prior to starting his epic - and massively flawed - "Key to All Mythologies" opus.   

The age of the kids involved matters a whole heap, too - and Botkin is strangely silent on that.  This is a family that could have four kids under the age of 4 or quadruplet 16-year old young men.   My son is three going on four.   Based on his interests, we need to start a company that designs and manufactures combination heavy equipment cleaning machines.  He's specifically fascinated by his wrecking-ball-crane-mop, but I'm sure this will be followed by the equally thrilling firetruck-duster, digger-dishwasher, and the perennial favorite chopper-broom.   I have to question, however, if anyone would be as enthusiastic about those expensive and strangely designed machines as we are.

Some 16-year olds have more formed interests; others not so much.   I've known plenty of high schoolers who genuinely believe they will be music stars, pro athletes, or fiction writers who are very far away from the skill set needed to fulfill those dreams.    I have known several teens who got fairly successful small businesses off the ground - one kid was an ace at small electronic repairs; another was a talented drummer - but the level of success each of them reached wasn't enough to support four people.   

I also knew teenagers who were supporting themselves and either dependent children or members of their family of origin.   They did that by working multiple part-time jobs while going to school and were always stressed and exhausted.|

This next section pretty much undermines Botkin's entire rhetoric about a small business being the salvation of a widow with small children:

[00:06:28] And I mean that could be an extraordinarily powerful thing which which starts off small  and grows small.  It's not a get rich quick scheme.  It's it's a get rich slow scheme. I mean, you know and if your husband is helping to craft one of those things into place and you're able to start little now with what you have with the boys being young.   This is one thing that we did in our family and and it built the kind of character and that's what we'll get to in a second and into the boys that they were  then able to take on more responsibility and then more and then more and more.  

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Come on, man.     All of that requires the dad to be alive and capable of helping to build the business. 

  The title of the video is "What If My Husband Dies?" with the implication that he'd die soon - not "What If My Husband Dies in Fifteen Years After Successfully Launching A Small Family Business?"

At least Botkin is being honest-adjacent.  Building a small business from scratch takes time.  It takes investment. Botkin has already admitted that the family is not likely to have life insurance and may have crippling bills from the father's COPD treatment, and that getting COVID would be really bad for the dad - so how exactly is this family going to launch a business?    That's ignoring the obvious as well; the middle of a pandemic is not a great time for most small business launches.   

More broadly - what small business is Geoffrey talking about his family building?  In the 1990's, he was involved in a fundamentalist Christian politics think tank in DC.  At some point, he hooked up with Vision Forum and failed to launch a conservative newspaper in Christchurch, NZ in the very early 2000's.   My understanding was that funded his family based on VF events until he decided to launch the Western Conservatory of Arts and Science around 2012-2013.  That was good timing since VF imploded in 2015 when Doug Phillips molestation of a live-in nanny become public knowledge.    For the last five years, he's been fairly silent online.  Now, at some point, the decently successful business T. Rex Arms was launched by one of the Botkin sons - but Botkin himself was never mentioned in even the earliest versions of their site.   

Building a small business is hard.  Doing so while a respiratory pandemic disease is circulating that could easily kill or maim the main breadwinner of the family is both dangerous and irresponsible.  

Good luck - and as always - don't write to Botkin for advice.