This is the most pussified country on earth. We are afraid of our own shadows. We fear phantom terrorists. We fear phantom perverts preying on our participation trophy cherubs. There should be a law. We fear guns in the hands of citizens, but we don’t fear guns in the hands of psychopathic police thugs. We fear good teachers disciplining our babies and making them work hard, but we don’t fear enriching drug companies by pumping our kids with dangerous psychotropic drugs.
I was free to go to the local playground when I was 9. We organized our own baseball, football, basketball and street hockey games. No adults needed. We played tackle football with no pads (the horror!!!) We played kick the can, tag, and war. We played in the creek for hours. We sledded down dangerous hills in the cemetery. I rode my bike 2 miles to school when I was 11 years old. Bike helmets didn’t even exist, and if they did you’d be called a pussy if you wore one. We walked on the trolley tracks all the way home from school. I somehow survived. I don’t even hold a grudge against my parents for putting me in so much danger.
And now the majority of pussies in this country want to criminalize letting kids be kids. What a pathetic joke this country has become.
Poll: Most Americans Want to Criminalize Pre-Teens Playing Unsupervised
A whopping 68 percent of Americans think there should be a law that prohibits kids 9 and under from playing at the park unsupervised, despite the fact that most of them no doubt grew up doing just that.
What’s more: 43 percent feel the same way about 12-year-olds. They would like to criminalize all pre-teenagers playing outside on their own (and, I guess, arrest their no-good parents).
Those are the results of a Reason/Rupe poll confirming that we have not only lost all confidence in our kids and our communities—we have lost all touch with reality.
“I doubt there has ever been a human culture, anywhere, anytime, that underestimates children’s abilities more than we North Americans do today,” says Boston College psychology professor emeritus Peter Gray, author of Free to Learn, a book that advocates for more unsupervised play, not less.
In his book, Gray writes about a group of 13 kids who played several hours a day for four months without supervision, though they were observed by an anthropologist. “They organized activities, settled disputes, avoided danger, dealt with injuries, distributed goods… without adult intervention,” he writes.
The kids ranged in age from 3 to 5.
Of course, those kids were allowed to play in the South Pacific, not South Carolina, where Debra Harrell was thrown in jail for having the audacity to believe her 9-year-old would be fine by herself at a popular playground teeming with activity. In another era, it not only would have been normal for a child to say, “Goodbye, mom!” and go off to spend a summer’s day there, it would have been odd to consider that child “unsupervised.” After all, she was surrounded by other kids, parents, and park personnel. Apparently now only a private security detail is considered safe enough.
Harrell’s real crime was that she refused to indulge in inflated fears of abduction and insist her daughter never leave her side. While there are obviously many neighborhoods wrecked by crime where it makes more sense to keep kids close, the country at large is enjoying its lowest crime level in decades.
Too bad most people reject this reality. The Reason/Rupe Poll asked “Do kids today face more threats to their physical safety?” and a majority—62 percent—said yes. Perhaps that’s because the majority of respondents also said they don’t think the media or political leaders are overhyping the threats to our kids.
But they are. “One culprit is the 24 hour news cycle,” said Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, when I asked him why so few kids are outside these days. Turn on cable TV, “and all you have to do is watch how they take a handful of terrible crimes against children and repeat that same handful over and over,” he said. “And then they repeat the trial over and over, and so we’re conditioned to live in a state of fear.”
Rationally understanding that we are living in very safe times is not enough to break the fear, he added.
So what is?
Experience. Through his Children and Nature Network, Louv urges families to gather in groups and go on hikes or even to that park down the street that Americans seem so afraid of. Once kids are outside with a bunch of other kids, they start to play. It just happens. Meanwhile, their parents stop imagining predators behind every bush because they are face to face with reality instead of Criminal Minds. They start to relax. It just happens.
Over time, they can gradually regain the confidence to let their kids go whoop and holler and have as much fun as they themselves did, back in the day.
Richard Florida, the urbanist and author of The Rise of the Creative Class, is one of the many parents today who recalls walking to school solo in first grade. He was in charge of walking his kindergarten brother the next year. The age that the Reason/Rupe respondents think kids should start walking to school without an adult is 12.
That’s the seventh grade.
Florida has intensely fond memories of riding his bike “everywhere” by the time he was 10. Me too. You too, I’m guessing. Why would we deny that joy to our own kids? Especially when we’re raising them in relatively safer times?
“Let your kids play in the park, for God’s sake,” Florida pleads. “We’ll all be better for it.”
Why should South Pacific toddlers have all the fun?
I hate these do-gooder fucks… The “there-aughta-be-a-law” kind…
Kind of same as you, Admin… messing in the creek for craw-dads and small fish. Played the same games as y’all, except we had “Kill the Guy” which isn’t really a game at all… whoever has the ball (or whatever totem you want to substitute) runs for his life while everyone else tries to tackle and/or beat his ass… 🙂 He hangs onto it for as long as possible. Some go down fighting, some throw the ball high in the air just before the howling mob of kids gets him… then some other brave soul picks up the ball and starts running for his life… 🙂 Good times, bro…
We walked snow-covered train tracks to school in the winter, being as nothing was moving, but the task-masters at school (Catholic) didn’t call it off because of snow… and, this being Kentuckistan, yes it was uphill in both directions…
We had BB-gun wars, bottle-rocket wars, ran amok with fireworks and matches (the GOOD kind) and we didn’t blow off fingers or burn half the world down. We built tree forts from lumber scavenged (okay, stolen) from construction sites. We swung from knotted, rotting ropes into the river and did all sorts of shit that kids are supposed to do…. and we survived.
Fuck these bed-wetting Nazi fucks… snitch assholes, every one of them, I betcha…
Being overly protective of kids. It is part of the cycle of generation theory. It will pass.
Old man had one main rule: Stay away from the train tracks or I’ll kick your ass until your nose bleeds. The visual on that was enough to do the trick. That and the visual of being cut in half by a train. I only hopped the train once. Had to do it at least once.
How much trouble could four kids get into on train tracks anyway?
@ Billy – We played ‘kill the guy’ , except unlike your PC version, we called it – Smear the Queer.
My poor mother would have been in jail, and her two daughters passed through a series of oh-so-perfect (NOT!!) foster homes in today’s climate. She was, you see, a struggling divorcee, something most people very much disapproved of in 1963, and she was moreover broke (something people in that materialistic time VERY much disapproved of). We were “latchkey kids” at ages 11 and 9 respectively, and the neighbors made their low opinion of that known to Mom in no uncertain terms.
These days, they’d call the police, and she’d go to jail, while we would be removed from her custody and sent to some squalid foster home with 5 or so other kids in it and a couple of uncaring slobs running it who were just hustling the state for the foster care payment.
I can’t remember it was bad. We were in no danger, and we learned a lot about responsibility and independence. We were expected to A. not tear the house up before Mom got home, and B. do the family wash and walk the dog; C. do our homework, and D. be back in the house by the time Mom got home. We lived in a nice neighborhood and ALL kids were let to roam the subdivision adjacent to us, and play at the public playground. I took my bike to the public swim pool a couple of miles away in the summer, went downtown shopping by myself at 11, feeling very adult. It was all a lot of fun. But it wasn’t like nothing bad ever happened- kids got abducted and preyed on by perverts at the same rate they do now. Mom, who was the fearful, worrying sort, gave us endless instruction on how to avoid predators- don’t go near cars, stay away from strange adults, don’t be in the park alone, etc.
These days, the whole thing is about punishing parents for not meeting upper-middle-class standards of parenting, and the penalties fall disproportionately on poorer parents, and single parents, being as they are without money to pay sitters and nannies, and an extra adult hand to keep an eye on the kids while one does errands like job interviews, or goes to work.
Sixty eight fucking percent want laws preventing kids from being kids?? What the fuck does that even mean? That they want the parents jailed? Fined? Have a felony record? Get tazed by police?
Godamn, I hate the people of this country … at least 68% of the fucktards, for sure.
Ya’ll know I grew up in Newark. We didn’t have too many public parks close by. So we played something called “stick ball” —- baseball, but with a broom stick and a pink rubber ball. We played it in the MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING STREET …. Dewey Street, not a main street, but a busy street, nonetheless. None of us kids gave a shit. In fact, we liked keeping motorists waiting; “Hey, quit beeping your fuckin horn! We got a man on 3rd base!!”. None of our parents gave a shit.
Me: “I’m gonna go play stick ball, mom.”
Mom: “OK. Where? The park?”
Me: “No. Out front, on the street.”
Mom: “OK. But watch out for the cars.”
I didn’t know that was child abuse. I should have reported her sorry ass.
Pretty timely post considering I just read this article from Readers Digest over the weekend.
http://www.rd.com/advice/parenting/revolution-not-supervised/
The Revolution Will Not Be Supervised
A trio of boys tramps along the length of a wooden fence, back and forth, shouting like carnival barkers. “The Land! It opens in half an hour.” When the gate finally swings open, the boys and about a dozen other children race directly to their favorite spots. “Is this a junkyard?” asks my five-year-old son, Gideon, who has come with me to visit. “Not exactly,” I tell him. The Land is a playground that takes up nearly an acre at the far end of a quiet housing development in North Wales. It’s only two years old but could just as well have been here for decades. The ground is muddy in spots and, at one end, slopes down steeply to a creek. The center of the playground is dominated by a high pile of tires that is growing ever smaller as a redheaded girl and her friend roll them down the hill and into the creek. “Why are you rolling tires into the water?” my son asks. “Because we are,” the girl replies.
Someone has started a fire in the tin drum in the corner. Three boys lounge in the only unbroken chairs around it. Nearby, a couple of other boys are doing mad flips on a stack of filthy mattresses, which makes a fine trampoline. At the other end of the playground, younger kids dart in and out of large structures made of wooden pallets stacked on top of one another. Occasionally a group knocks down a few pallets—just for the fun of it or to build some new kind of slide or fort or unnamed structure.
Other than some walls lit up with graffiti, there are no bright colors or anything else that belongs to the usual playground landscape: no shiny metal slide, no yellow seesaw with a central ballast to make sure no one falls off, no rubber bucket swing for babies. There is, however, a frayed rope swing that carries you over the creek and deposits you on the other side, if you can make it that far (otherwise, it deposits you in the creek). On this day, the kids seem excited by a walker that was donated by one of the elderly neighbors and is repurposed, at different moments, as a scooter, a jail cell, and a gymnastics bar.
The Land is an “adventure playground.” In the United Kingdom, such playgrounds became popular in the 1940s as a result of the efforts of Lady Marjory Allen of Hurtwood, a landscape architect and children’s advocate. Allen wanted to design playgrounds with loose parts that kids could move around to create their own makeshift structures. But more important, she wanted to encourage a “free and permissive atmosphere” with as little adult supervision as possible. The idea was that kids should face what, to them, seem like “really dangerous risks” and conquer them alone. That, she said, is what builds self-confidence and courage. But these playgrounds are so out of sync with today’s norms that when I showed fellow parents back home a video of kids lighting fires, the most common sentence I heard from them was “This is insane.” That might explain why there are so few adventure playgrounds left around the world and why a newly established one, such as the Land, feels like an act of defiance.
The Land is staffed by professionally trained “playworkers,” who keep a close eye on the kids but don’t intervene all that much. Claire Griffiths, the manager, describes her job as “loitering with intent.” Although the playworkers almost never stop the kids from what they’re doing, before the playground had even opened, the workers had filled binders with “risk benefits assessments” for nearly every activity. (In the two years since the Land opened, no one has been injured outside of the occasional scraped knee.) Here’s the list of benefits for fire: “It can be a social experience to sit around with friends, make friends, to sing songs and to dance around, to stare at; it can be a cooperative experience where everyone has jobs. It can be something to experiment with, to take risks, to test its properties, its heat, its power, to relive our evolutionary past.” The risks? “Burns from fire or fire pit” and “children accidentally burning each other with flaming cardboard or wood.” In this case, the benefits win because a playworker is always nearby, watching for impending accidents but otherwise letting the children figure out lessons about fire on their own.
“I’m gonna put this cardboard box in the fire,” one of the boys says.
“You know that will make a lot of smoke,” says Griffiths.
“Where there’s smoke, there’s fire,” he answers, and in goes the box. Smoke instantly fills the air and stings our eyes. The other boys sitting around the fire cough, duck their heads, and curse him out. In my playground set, we would call this natural consequences, although we rarely have the nerve to let even much tamer scenarios than this one play out. By contrast, the custom at the Land is for parents not to intervene. In fact, it’s for parents not to come at all. The dozens of kids who passed through the playground on the day I visited came and went on their own. In seven hours, aside from Griffiths and the other playworkers, I saw only two adults.
Even though women work vastly more hours now than they did in the 1970s, mothers—and fathers—spend much more time with their children than they used to. My own mother didn’t work all that much when I was younger, but she didn’t spend vast amounts of time with me either. She didn’t arrange my playdates or drive me to swimming lessons. On weekdays after school, she just expected me to show up for dinner; on weekends, I barely saw her at all. I, on the other hand, might easily spend every waking Saturday hour with one, if not all three, of my children, taking one to a soccer game, the second to a theater program, the third to a friend’s house, or I might just hang out with them at home. When my daughter was about ten, my husband suddenly realized that in her whole life, she had probably spent not more than ten minutes unsupervised by an adult. Not ten minutes in ten years.
When you ask parents why they are more protective than their parents were, they might answer that the world is more dangerous now than it was when they were growing up. But this isn’t true, or at least not in the way that we think. Maybe the real questions are, How did these fears come to have such a hold over us? And what have our children lost—and gained—as we’ve succumbed to them?
In 1978, a toddler named Frank Nelson made his way to the top of a 12-foot slide in Hamlin Park in Chicago, with his mother a few steps behind him. The structure was known as a tornado slide because it twisted on the way down. But the boy never made it that far. He fell through the gap between the handrail and the steps and landed on his head on the asphalt. A year later, his parents sued the Chicago Park District and the two companies that had manufactured and installed the slide. Frank had fractured his skull in the fall and suffered permanent brain damage. He was forced to wear a helmet all the time to protect his fragile skull.
The Nelsons’ lawsuit was one of a number that fueled a backlash against potentially dangerous playground equipment. Theodora Briggs Sweeney, a consumer advocate and safety consultant from John Carroll University, became a public crusader for playground reform. “The name of the playground game will continue to be Russian roulette, with the child as unsuspecting victim,” Sweeney wrote in 1979. She was concerned about many things—the height of slides, the space between railings, the danger of loose S-shaped hooks that hold parts together—but what she worried about most was asphalt and dirt. Sweeney declared that lab simulations showed children could die from a fall of as little as a foot if their head hit asphalt or three feet if their head hit dirt.
A federal government report around that time found that tens of thousands of children were turning up in the emergency room each year because of playground accidents. As a result, in 1981 the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission published the first Handbook for Public Playground Safety, a short set of general guidelines to govern the equipment.
In January 1985, the Chicago Park District settled the suit with the Nelsons. Frank Nelson was guaranteed a minimum of $9.5 million. Park departments all over the country began removing equipment newly considered dangerous. The cultural understanding of acceptable risk began to shift, until any known risk became nearly synonymous with hazard.
At the core of the safety obsession is a view of children that is the exact opposite of Lady Allen’s, “an idea that children are too fragile or unintelligent to assess the risk of any given situation,” argues Tim Gill, author of No Fear, a critique of our risk-averse society. “Now our working assumption is that children cannot be trusted to find their way around tricky physical or social and emotional situations.”
What’s lost amid all this protection? Ellen Sandseter, a professor of early childhood education, observed and interviewed children on playgrounds. In 2011, she published her results. Children, she concluded, have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn’t mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that they feel they are taking a great risk. That scares them, but then they overcome the fear. Sandseter identifies six kinds of risky play: 1. Exploring heights, or getting the “bird’s perspective,” as she calls it—“high enough to evoke the sensation of fear.” 2. Handling dangerous tools—using sharp scissors or knives, or heavy hammers that at first seem unmanageable but that kids learn to master. 3. Being near dangerous elements—playing near vast bodies of water or near a fire, so kids are aware there is danger nearby. 4. Rough-and-tumble play wrestling and play fighting—so kids learn to negotiate aggression and cooperation. 5. Speed—cycling or skiing at a pace that feels too fast. 6. Exploring on one’s own.
The final irony is that our close attention to safety has not in fact made a tremendous difference in the number of accidents children have. The number of emergency room visits related to playground equipment, including home equipment, in 1980 was 156,000, or one visit per 1,452 Americans. In 2012, it was 271,475 visits, or one per 1,156 Americans. The number of deaths hasn’t changed much either. Head injuries, a fatal fall onto a rock—most of the horrors that Sweeney described all those years ago turn out to be freakishly rare.
The category on Sandseter’s list that likely makes this generation of parents most nervous is the one involving children’s straying from adult supervision. Parents these days have little tolerance for children’s wandering on their own, for reasons that, much like the fear of playground injuries, have their roots in the 1970s. In 1979, nine months after Frank Nelson fell off that slide, six-year-old Etan Patz left his family’s New York apartment to walk by himself to the school-bus stop. He never came home. The Etan Patz case launched the era of the ubiquitous missing child.
But abduction cases like Etan Patz’s were incredibly uncommon a generation ago and remain so today. What has changed is the nature of the American family and the broader sense of community. For a variety of reasons—divorce, more single-parent families, more mothers working—both families and neighborhoods have lost some of their cohesion. Trust in general has eroded, and parents have sought to control more closely what they can: their children. Ask any of my parenting peers to chronicle a week in their child’s life, and they will likely mention school, homework, after-school classes, organized playdates, sports teams coached by a fellow parent, and very little free, unsupervised time. The result is a “continuous and ultimately dramatic decline in children’s opportunities to play and explore in their own chosen ways,” writes Peter Gray, a psychologist at Boston College.
When Claire Griffiths, the Land’s manager, applies for grants to fund her play spaces, she often lists the advantages of enticing kids outside: combating obesity, developing motor skills. She also talks about the issue Lady Allen talked about all those years ago—encouraging children to take risks so they build their confidence.
But the more nebulous benefits of a freer child culture are harder to explain, even though experiments bear them out. For example, beginning in 2011, Swanson Primary School in New Zealand suspended all playground rules, allowing the kids to run, climb trees, slide down a hill, jump off swings, and play in a “loose-parts pit” that was like a mini adventure playground. The teachers feared chaos, but in fact what they got was less naughtiness and bullying—because the kids were too busy and engaged to want to cause trouble, the principal said.
Kyung-Hee Kim, an educational psychologist at the College of William & Mary, has analyzed results from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking and found that, over the past decade or more, American children have become “less emotionally expressive, less energetic, less talkative and verbally expressive, less humorous, less imaginative, less unconventional, less lively and passionate, less perceptive, less apt to connect seemingly irrelevant things, less synthesizing, and less likely to see things from a different angle.” The largest drop has been in the measure of “elaboration,” or the ability to take an idea and expand on it in a novel way. Practicing psychologists have also written about the unique identity crisis that this generation faces—a fear of growing up and, in the words of Brooke Donatone, a New York City–based therapist, an inability “to think for themselves.”
Researchers have started pushing back against parental control. But the real cultural shift has to come from parents. We can no more create the perfect environment for our children than we can create perfect children. To believe otherwise is a delusion, and a harmful one; remind yourself of that every time the panic rises.
As the sun set over the Land, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a gray bin—like the kind you would keep your recycling in—about to be pushed down the slope that led to the creek. A kid’s head poked out of the top, and I realized it was my son’s. Even by my relatively laissez-faire parenting standards, the situation seemed dicey. The slope was very steep, and Christian, the kid who was doing the pushing, was only seven. Also, the creek was frigid, and I had no change of clothes for Gideon.
“You might fall in the creek,” said Christian.
“I know,” said Gideon.
Christian had already taught Gideon how to climb up to the highest slide and manage the rope swing. At this point, he’d earned some trust. “I’ll push you gently, OK?”
“Ready, steady, go!” Gideon said in response. Down he went and landed in the creek. In my experience, Gideon is very finicky about water. He hates to have even a drop land on his sleeve while he’s brushing his teeth. I began scheming how to get him new clothes. Could I knock on a neighbor’s door? Or persuade him to sit awhile with the boys by the fire?
“I’m wet,” Gideon said to Christian, and then they raced over to claim some hammers to build a new fort.
© 2014 The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.
[img[/img]
Can’t wait. Just can’t wait until this whole goddam rotten edifice collapses of its own miserable stinking weight.
“dilligaf says:
@ Billy – We played ‘kill the guy’ , except unlike your PC version, we called it – Smear the Queer.”
Yeah, we played the exact same game too, and we called it “Nigger Pile”.
All that other stuff too, riding bikes all over creation, walking and rising bikes to school, riding bikes on the 5th floor of an unfinished office building and standing on top of the concrete block walls at the top edge with nothing but air bet wen us and the ground 5 floors below. Setting up ramps and jumping over kids with our bikes,going out in boats on the lake, fishing, gettng hooks in our hands, walking through knee deep muck, etc etc – all this in suburgan Ft. Lauderdale in the 1960s/very early 70s.
The last 2 lines in this poster …… that’s the problem with those 68% fuckwad Americans
[img[/img]
Seems to me TPTB are looking for more ways to keep the privatized penal structure occupied since the “war on drugs” is in the process of winding down. “Parental incarceration” is just one method; I expect we’ll see many more including “debtors prisons”.
Hell, when I was 8 I took off on my bike for hours at a time and my parents had no idea where I was. It was fun and I learned a LOT!
Playgrounds these days are built by lawyers.
At age 6, I fell off the top of the school playground slide and banged my head on the asphalt, which a few folks think is my “problem”, har. My parents were sick with worry, but it never occurred to them to file suit. I was not really injured, as I have a VERY hard head (ask my boyfriend).
These days, our population is so infected with Advanced Litigitus, especially when it comes to their kids, that you’re afraid to even greet a child without express permission from his parents. And never, never, ever, ever offer a kid any kind of gift, especially food, except through the parent!! I once complimented a little girl on the beautiful pet rabbit she was carrying, and she offered to let me pet it. I first addressed her mother and asked if it was OK. The man I was on a date with remarked that I “ignored children” because I addressed her mother rather than her, and I told him, you are asking for a lawsuit, or worse, charges of being a child predator, if you address a kid directly.
overthecliff is correct, the overprotective nature of child rearing in a 4T is what makes the Artist generational archetype so conformist and afraid to rock the boat. What they ARE good at, is compromise. Our current Silent generation reflects that, and the kids born after 2005 are known as “Homelanders” in 4T circles, since we expect that the U.S. will be much more internally-focused when the Crisis is finally over.
Fun fact: no Artist archetype has ever been elected President of the U.S.
Instead of arresting parents for stupid crap like this, they should arrest them for important stuff, like naming their kids ridiculous things like Dweezil, Shatoylika, and Berthold.
Those are real crimes and can cause terrible pain to young people.
There needs to be laws to put a stop to it!
I didn’t know others played Kill the Guy (same game, no matter what the name is..)… that’s actually pretty cool..
Rules for Kill the Guy (aka “Nigger Pile”, “Smear the Queer”, etc) as best as I can figure…
Rule 0. There are no real rules or referee. And even if there were, any “rules” are subject to change or can be ignored by popular vote.
Rule 1. If you have the ball, you best run. (This does not usually require encouragement).
Rule 2. If the howling mob gets you, you WILL get your ass handed to you.
Rule 3. It is permissible to throw the ball away in order to save your skin, but you’ll be considered a little bitch for doing it, unless…
Rule 3a. You throw the ball to a hated enemy, which causes the mob to swarm him.
Rule 4. Going down fighting is preferable. The longer you stay on your feet, the more respect awarded.
Rule 5. No matter how big you are, there’s way more of us than you.
Rule 6. If you throw the ball to someone, they are honor bound to catch it and run with it. You can’t not catch it. Not catching the ball is worse than intentionally throwing it away.
Rule 7. No crying.
Rule 8. No complaining.
Rule 9. “Base” or any safe zone does not exist and, in fact, never existed. You’re on your own.
Rule 10. Pitching the ball into someone’s face and catching it on the rebound is awarded extra points.
Rule 11. There are no “points”.
Rule 12. The game ends by popular consensus, or the owner of the ball has to go home for dinner…
My grandfather brought me a shotgun for my 12th birth day. We hunted , we went fishing ,camping all by ourselves especially during the summer. We made homemade pipe bombs. During the 4th of July we would get real fire crackers.M80s ,Cherry Bombs and TNT .Looking back on it a lot of the shit we did was dangerous but it taught us responsibility. It taught us to look out for each other. Hell ,these days parents would be put in jail for letting there kids play the way we did growing up.
“Instead of arresting parents for stupid crap like this, they should arrest them for important stuff, like naming their kids ridiculous things like Dweezil, Shatoylika, and Berthold.”
——— Stucky Doppler
That’s pretty funny. Again.
And don’t think I haven’t thought about it.
I wrote a post about my godfather’s funeral last month. “Berthold” was named after him. One down, two to go.
My husband and his brother grew up in Cleveland. They had paper routes that got them out onto the street at 4 a.m. on their bikes to pick up and deliver to their street.
On weekends, they would take the bus all the way across town to see the Browns play. Sometimes, their parents didn’t even KNOW. The “rule” in their house on Saturdays was that the kids would be home before it got dark in the summer time.
I grew up on a farm. We didn’t have that silly “before dark” rule. We just had the get up and do your chores rule and be ready for church on Sunday rule.
It was actually called the “Without Reason/Dope Poll”.
I grew up not in the ghetto or Tobacco Road but in the greenest, nicest patch of Suburbia you can imagine. We roamed the woods and streams and over railroad trestles at liberty often wearing little more than a pair of cut-offs and the blackened soles of our bare feet. That was the Seventies. As time went on, however, we found other things to do with our freedom, like sneak booze from our parents’ liquor cabinets and smoke reefer in imitation of our radio and TV heroes. In those days you could get a bong at the mall. Thanks to our wonderful Supreme Court, hardcore porno movies played at the local cinema with their names out on the marquee where no internet filter could hide them. Yet our parents were so trusting, as if they couldn’t conceive that their kids could get messed up by all this. (13-14 year-olds getting drunk and stoned is messed up by the way.) The fact is they couldn’t imagine it because in the Forties, when they were kids, such things were almost inconceivable.
They are very much conceivable to us today because we saw and did them. We saw fine lads from decent prosperous homes turned into pumpkin heads who can’t support their own families because of dope. We saw beautiful girls hardened by early and promiscuous sex and abortion. Many went through all this and came out reasonably intact. But let’s not kid ourselves. In the aggregate their was a massive cost to the permissiveness and outright obliviousness of so many of our parents who were often too caught up in their own “issues” to properly supervise their children. Are parents today way too overprotective? Maybe. Is it a shame that we don’t trust our communities enough to let our kids play at the park unsupervised? Absolutely. But it’s not like our paranoia is totally groundless. Not at all.
Billy, those rules brought back a lot of memories. I wonder if the kids play like that today? There is something wrong with 4 year olds playing T-ball. +100 Billy.
Parents today are such pussies, always afraid that “something might happen”- something always did happen, but it was usually not bad and taught us a few skills not requiring electronic devices. I was in Pennsylvania, I was 11 years old and I was a golf caddy. I hitchhiked at 5 AM to the caddy shack 30 miles away relying on strangers for a ride there and home again. I did this for years and never had a single bad incident……… twice a day…… for years, until I got my second job in a pizza shop. Most of my friends would go with me to the creek or to the zoo on weekends and our parents didn’t want us around until dinnertime. None of us ever had any problems and none died, nor had any serious injuries except those that were inflicted on us by our friends.Today each of us has at least a Masters Degree and a few have Doctorates. Maybe today more kids would attain success if they were allowed to develope internal self reliance instead of neurotic parental safety.
The sad part is we have infantilized our kids to the point they can’t grow up until they’re 21, or older. I’ve read in Africa, kids are, or were, expected to be out herding the family animals at age 4. All alone at four years old, herding animals and keeping them safe and accounted for. That’s a hell of a long way from here where you’re not an adult until you’re 21. Even when you’re 21, they still treat you like an idiot in college. Conditioned to being treated like children, even as adults, we act like children, even as adults.
Read about our ancestors. Here’s a story that shames me. The man who would go on to be Admiral Oliver Hazard Perry started his Navy career in 1799 as a midshipman at the age of 13. He fought France in the Quasi-War and was given command of a prize ship, which he sailed back to the US with a prize crew and the French crew. Perry prevented a mutiny by the French by carrying loaded pistols at all times. He was 13 and already in command of a ship in a war. We are mere pussies by comparison.
ITS great to see afew who have wokeup,BUT it is far to late you know,THE children,were crushed for a reason,SO THEY WOULDN’T fight,and if you knew what it was really about, who knows what you’d do,BUT I will tell you this,AMERICA IS COMPLETELY LOST,and the children who were turned into little queers ,ARE now running everything,THATS 90% of the population,it can’t be fixed,THEY WON’T LET YOU,america is going to be INVADED shortly and all those queers will be killed,If I were anyone whos awake,I’D be getting ready for WAR,ITS coming and the military are all queers and the police gangs are all demons from hell,and THERE IS NO ONE TO STAND UP,you will be on your own,IN THE MIDDLE of a fearce war here shortly……SO BE GETTING READY,or you’ll be rounded up like the sheep will be,and their going to all be killed,and don’t go anywhere with out your best battle rifle,with you at ALL TIMES from now on……..
Gil,
I remember reading about Perry. Guy was hard core..
Remember reading about him during some battle or other. The captain gave him an order to go below deck and bring up another box of primers for the guns.
Perry is coming up from below deck when a cannon ball blows the head off some sailor. The headless corpse topples down the stairs, spewing blood and taking Perry with it…
Perry comes back up, covered in blood.
“Are you alright?” asks the Captain.
“Yes sir.” answers Perry.
“Then where are the primers?” asks the Captain.
Perry went below and got the primers.
This is the kind of shit that made men – AMERICAN MEN – some of the most hard core motherfuckers on the planet. Men like this were the ones who conquered a continent.
We used to be a nation of badasses… now we’re a nation of pussies, and anyone who deviates from that pussified path is mocked, ridiculed or considered “abnormal”….
Fuck all these motherfuckers…
@Albrecht, so you are saying that today’s kids are NOT sneaking alcohol and doing drugs?
Are you really this blind to reality, or are you that stupid?
And, btw, the “40s” were NOT some “drug and alcohol” free zone of no sex before marriage. That is nothing but a 70s Christian paintbrush that was used to convince us to give up our rights to protect the children.
HUMANS have used alcohol and drugs for thousands of years. HUMANS have had premarital sex, even when in fear of the church, for as long as “legal” marriage has existed.
Pretending that our past is something it is not is leading people like you to applaud the “protections” that are nothing more than prison rules.
I really don’t have “hate” in my heart for many, but I am way beyond hating the assholes in this society that believe growing regulation and government is keeping us safe when ALL evidence and facts point to the contrary.
It is estimated that 25% of US adults have smoked pot within the past month. THAT stat has NOT changed in decades. All the laws, crimes, and cops, haven’t moved it one iota.
THAT means that more than likely out of the “experts” you have turned your life/power over to, one quarter of them have used drugs recently.
Oh the fear, be afraid, and while you are at it, please go forth and demand more laws.
We apparently no longer need freedom, or choices, what we really need are shepherds and cops. Oh yeah, judges and parole officers too.
What a tool.
Oh, and just to let you know, I was a straight A student, I had strict parents with all sorts of rules and curfews, and I could, and did, smoke pot, drink and do other stupid shit. I just did it before curfew and out of the sight of other ‘rents.
*sigh* I can’t believe how ignorant, lazy and fearful, this country has become.
@Thinker: “Fun fact: no Artist archetype has ever been elected President of the U.S.”
Artist‐Adaptive
We remember Artists best for their quiet years of rising adulthood
(the log‐cabin settlers of 1800, the plains farmers of 1880, the new
suburbanites of 1960) and during their midlife years of flexible,
consensus‐building leadership (the ʺCompromisesʺ of the Whig era, the
ʺgood governmentʺ reforms of the Progressive era, the budget and peace
processes of the current era). Overprotected as children, they become
under protective parents. Their principal endowment activities are in the
domain of pluralism, expertise, and due process. Their best‐known
leaders include: William Shirley and Cadwallader Colden; John Quincy
Adams and Andrew Jackson; Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson;
Walter Mondale, and Colin Powell. These have been sensitive and
complex social technicians, advocates of fair play and the politics of
inclusion. With the single exception of Andrew Jackson, they rank as the
most expert and credentialed of American political leaders.
from “Winter is Coming”, by Jim Goulding.
http://www.jamesgoulding.com/wic.htm
we did everything as kids in jersey….I remember playing football in the street….guy go down and out….cut right in front of a parked car…..really tough to stop……its like you’re not really even a kid today….such a shame….so many adventures…..and lessons missed….pura vida