Riding the Bus

Here's a little follow up to yesterday's post about about being a nation of wimps. I think that everyone in America should be forced to take a course in statistics. (Not that I've ever had such a course, but I do understand the basics.) If we all took the course, I suspect that there would be a lot less lottery tickets purchased, and a whole lot less time spent worrying about our kids.

When I was a kid, it was common practice for my mother to drop me off downtown for a movie, and afterwards, I would walk home or take the bus if it was raining. I'm talking about a two mile walk across town, when I was as young as seven or eight years old. You might argue that Concord was a very small town way back then, but I would counter, that my wife, who is from Philadelphia, tells me that, at the same age, she would take a bus or train alone to downtown Philadelphia, from her home up in the North East part of town, to go to movies or to visit friends. By the time I was twelve, I would come home from school, get my rifle, and walk the four blocks to the edge of town to go squirrel hunting. I was never stopped by the police, or interviewed by Channel Nine News. I have always carried a pocket knife from the start of the first grade right up to the present. I did get in trouble over it once in the sixth grade, not because I had it in class, but because I was throwing it and making it stick into the floor. Mr Freeze confiscated my knife and gave me one of two spankings I got that day, but returned my knife to me at the end of the school year.

Here's a real shocker. The Concord city swimming pool was managed in the summers by my seventh grade principal,Mr. McGinnis, who was a real hard ass.
He managed to spank me at least three times that year, and slapped the snot out of me at least once. Anyway, there was this older guy who hung out at the pool when I was a pre-teen. He was a known pervert. If he got the chance, he would feel up the young boys. Everybody knew it, the life guards, Mr. McGinnis, all of us kids. It wasn't a big deal, we just avoided him. Now, I'm not condoning sexual predators, and certainly some percentage of pedophiles actually do harm to their victims. But here's the thing, statistically, the odds of a child being harmed by a pedophile, kidnapped, drowned, run over by a car, or shooting himself with a gun were pretty slim back then, and are still pretty slim today. Especially If the parents have the good sense to teach their kids how to avoid the pitfalls of every day life.

I've read that dogs were domesticated by continued selective breeding for dogs that demonstrated puppy hood through out their adult lives. This breeding made them playful and docile, but did not prepare them for life in the wild. It seems that we are doing the same things to our children.