Danger Will Robinson ... We've Wimped Out!

SEE HERE Amazon hit me with an new email today about something they call Kindle Singles which apparently are short pieces on "ideas." So I'm a sucker for looking anyway, and went and looked at some of the wares being offered. I actually only load old classics on my Kindle, and some new Computer Science works, but these were interesting to browse through a little.

One caught my eye because it strikes me that it highlights a real problem in our modern society. I'm not sure exactly when we became a nation of wimps who were afraid of their own shadows, but it's happened in my lifetime.

When I was a boy we burned leaves along the road in Falls Church in the middle of a suburban housing development. Now we're afraid of our shadows if we, heavens to betsy, burn leaves. All the kids carried knives to school just because we were cubscouts or boyscouts and that was what boys carried. Most of us had shot BB guns and a lot of us had .22 rifles which we used under supervision. All the high schools has rifle teams and usually there were girls and guys on them. They shot these big bull-nose .22's. We played with mercury a little, making pennies really shiny and I remember if you lived near railroad tracks it was fun putting pennies on the tracks and picking them up again after the train had gone by because they were all flattened. There wasn't nearly as much organized sports which was good because then we could organize for ourselves and go down to the local park or open ball field and create a pick up game. You'd choose sides using a baseball bat and a grab the bat hand over hand method to decide who picked first. Soccer was mostly thought of as kickball in the street. We'd have to stop for a minute if any cars came by. Everyone liked to play with slingshots. We'd make them with rubber bands and shoot paper wads or paper clips. You had to be very careful with the paper clips because they could hurt someone. Chemistry sets in those days had real chemicals in them. We had lincoln logs and tinker toys and constructor sets that let you build really interesting and significant things. There used to be model airplane kids with balsa wood, not these prefabricated plastic things. We had little engines we could run. There were electronic kits to make things. When I was a boy we had real fire crackers and cherry bombs. Every now and again some fool kid would hurt himself, but that was because they'd not been properly taught how to use the things safely. Now noone is allowed to use them.

Nowadays all that kind of thing seems frowned upon. Everything is homogenized and sterilized and sanitized and boring and non-creative. We've been wimpified and scared half to death by ghoststories that have little reality. You might as well put everyone in a padded cell. The world is not a safe place and bringing up kids in a padded cell isn't going to make it any safer. We need to get back to teaching kids about the real world and not teaching everyone to be afraid of their shadow.