I’ve believed for some time now that we Americans are turning ourselves into a nation of infantilized wussies. Seriously. We worry constantly about achieving “closure” for every little childhood trauma, we dress ourselves in soft ‘n’ cuddly fleece outfits that resemble nothing so much as overgrown jammies (all they need are the sewn-in feet), and we’re downright obsessed with safety. Cops pulling you over for not wearing your seatbelt, those obnoxious seals that have to be removed from all of our food and medicine containers, warnings on the sides of our coffee cups that the contents may be hot (duh!)… it’s enough to make me want to run out and do something positively reckless, like run with the bulls in Pamplona or wave freshly baked cupcakes at the women coming out of Gold’s Gym.<\/p>\n
\nI really worry, however, about what we’re doing to our kids with all this safety nonsense. Maybe I don’t have any room to say anything on this subject because I’m not yet a parent myself, but when I see some little tyke dressed in a tiny little suit of protective armor just to go ride his bike or use her rollerskates, it just makes me sad.<\/p>\n
Which is probably why I reacted so strongly to the following bit of electronic flotsam that washed up here on the shores of Simple Tricksia. It arrived in an e-mail from one of my parents’ friends, so I imagine it’s probably supposed to be aimed at the Baby Boomer demographic. However, I think we folks who grew up in the Groovy ’70s and Awesome ’80s (at least the early ’80s) can relate, too. Just imagine all of the following being read by Dana Carvey<\/a> in his Grumpy Old Man voice<\/a>:<\/p>\n First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and\/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As children, we rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Riding in the back of a pickup on a warm day was always a special treat.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We shared soft drinks with four friends, from ONE bottle, and NO ONE actually died from this.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter, and we drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we weren’t overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We would spend hours building go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We did not have Playstations, Nintendos, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video-tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms… WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n [Ed. note: okay, so this one doesn’t apply to us ’80s kids very well, since we were the generation that first experienced videogames and movies at home. However, I suspect today’s rugrats are a lot worse off in the media-overload department than we were.]<\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This missive wrapped up on a rather shrill note which I won’t reproduce here, a denouncement of government regulations and an equally distasteful pat on the back for those almighty Boomers — who, when you think about it, are basically the generation that created all the regulations and corresponding fears to begin with, to the detriment of us all, I think.<\/p>\n Don’t misunderstand my point in posting this stuff. I’m not opposed to reasonable<\/i> regulation of things that might hurt us or of taking sensible<\/i> steps to increase safety. I just think that when we won’t let our kids roam the neighborhoods unescorted for fear they might<\/i> get kidnapped or injured, when we obsess endlessly over all the bad things that might<\/i> happen to us (rather than rationally examining the statistics and realizing how astronomically high the odds are in our favor), then maybe we might want to reevaluate where we’re headed as a society. Just a thought…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’ve believed for some time now that we Americans are turning ourselves into a nation of infantilized wussies. Seriously. We worry constantly about achieving “closure” for every little childhood trauma, we dress ourselves in soft ‘n’ cuddly fleece outfits that resemble nothing so much as overgrown jammies (all they need are the sewn-in feet), and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-589","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-old-man-throwing-rocks-at-the-kids"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=589"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/589\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=589"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=589"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=589"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}