Town Hall: “Think of the children!”
I have daughters. And neighbors, nephews, nieces, cousins, friends with children. And friends who used to be children. Some who maybe still are.
But when the command to “think of the children” is screamed aloud by freaked-out paranoiacs demanding more laws, more punishments, more prison time, more surveillance — and consequently less freedom — I try to remain calm and think responsibly.
As did one Corey Widen, when she “let her 8-year-old do the most normal, cheerful thing in the world — walk the dog around the block.” Lenore Skenazy tells the tale in Reason. “After the girl returned home, the doorbell rang. It was the police.”
Someone in Widen’s Wilmette, Illinois, community had seen the child and dog walking around “unsupervised” and called 911.
The thing, there was no lack of supervision here. The child was supervising the dog.
What could be more natural?
The neighbor could have walked outside and smiled at the kid and talked about the dog and, in general, been a good neighbor.
Think of it as a peaceful order of supervision.
Two words.
Wilmette, Illinois
If you’ve ever been there, you’d know.
And when do the police tell nosey neighbor Mrs. Kravitz to MHOFB instead of rewarding it?
If you let your kids get fat, it’s child abuse. If you let them wander free, it’s child abuse. If you spank them, it’s definitely child abuse.
If you let them sit in a car while you run an errand it’s child abuse.
At some point, it’s less about putting your child on a leash and more about putting you on one under the aegis of protecting our global village’s children.
Like MSNBC said, they don’t belong to you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hAAMGatMHss
At 7 years old I was riding a bike alone to a friends house two blocks away. I remember it vividly because the bike was too big for me and I had a nut crushing slip of the foot more than once. Just thought I’d put that out there.
Toto. We ain’t in Kansas no more.
When I was a kid we would eat breakfast, jump on the old stingray, look up the gang and gone for the day! (Or until we got hungry) Hell, sometimes we even crossed the bridge in to Canada.
I’m thinking if you want a Free Range Kid (I was a free range kid, we probably all were) you best find a safe range.
CLLICHE
i know befor you.
When I was a kid Hank 1 had a big hit “Mind Your Own busniess”
“… if ya mind your won business you’ll stay busy all the time…..”
Hank could neither read nor write music But he understood folk better than a lot of “our Betters”!
I’ve ben all over the world – except Afric + Australia -every high class night club ( Southerners say “Honkey tonk”- workers say “bar”) will in an hour play music by 2 Americans: Elvis din Elvis and a song Hank 1 wroe usually covered by someone north of the MD line. but Hank’s musis!
Gone on bikes all day on Sat.
looking for returnable soda bottles.
Saving for a cool “Sabre” brand El Cheapo
knife on the display board at the original
7-11 store.That was 1964 in Charleston,SC.
Man we had it made back then !
Summer was a blast. The rule was, when the street lights come on, you better have your ass home. Tons of friends. I wore out several Stingray’s.
In many parts of the world kids are free range and are required to help provide for the family. In earlier generations kids were working in the US, transporting themselves to school, for recreation, for helping the family. This is just insanity. I realize there are more perverts out there today, but it is still insanity.
My friends and I were riding our horses all over the place, up in the hills, climbing trees while letting the horses graze. Like Bad_Brad, we had to be back by dinner or dark. I rode up in the hills on my own, too, if my friends couldn’t ride that day. No big deal and we learned a lot about our capabilities, our horses, nature, etc.
When I think of all the hair-brained things we got up to as kids, it makes me cringe. The best thing about being a kid is how your agility and young bones protect you from real disaster most of the time. I always thought that people had large families because some of us would probably get killed by our own stupidity. Acceptable losses. If one or even two croaked, there’d still be five or six left.
There is a really good article over at American Greatness blog, “Millennials Are Breaking Free From the Thought Police”, in which the writer talks about these first generations of American children who, by and large, turned into the “hive” when day care became the norm — when women and couples decided (or out of the necessity of cost of living) that the mom should work outside the home. Interestingly, the explosion of single motherhood — through divorce, choice, or absent fathers — coincided with women placing a higher priority on a career and income than before. I’d never really thought so deeply before of how that changed childhood. It’s not so much that kids can’t do the things we did growing up, but that they just didn’t have the same kind of childhood at all. Instead of hours of finding ways to entertain ourselves, these daycare kids (before and after school) have day upon day of structure where every kind of physical, mental and emotional challenge they face has already been anticipated by the people who care for them and already have a solution. These places are more locked-down than the freedom we give our dogs at a dog park.
Anyway….always so much more to say…as you know 🙂
oj: HW does not get too much love in Nashville these days. Nobody worth a damn does. Possibly the greatest American songwriter can’t compare to Thumprint Face #6 with two first names and a cowboy hat Marketing put on him singing the same song about sitting on the tailgate on a Saturday night with a cold beer and some country cutie.
Nobody will remember them in 10 years.
Now that we have social media and online games, there is no legitimate reason for a child to leave the house.
Just a couple of days ago, a memory popped up on my FB page. It was from the Fremont NH Police Log from two years prior, stating the police had been called to the scene of two children playing in a yard.
Let that sink in… Two children… playing in a yard…
The log went on to say no charges were filed, as the children were being properly supervised. In other words, at least one parent/caregiver was present. Yet some busybody with nothing better to do than sneer at his/her neighbors STILL called the police because two kids were PLAYING in their OWN YARD instead of having their eyes glued to a TV or some video game as they stuffed their mouths full of fatty snacks!
I grieve for the world I grew up in that no longer exists.
And yet for all the creeps, pervs, criminals, antifas, and Kenyan Usurpers it’s all a government approved Open Range.
And John McCain was our greatest veteran and statesman evah!
Announce who called, will never happen again.