Posted on 10/08/2009 4:24:14 AM PDT by rhema
Remember when we used to jump on our bikes with a sack lunch, take off on a summer morning and not come back until suppertime? And nobody worried. Mom said, "Be careful"; Dad was at work; siblings were otherwise occupied or along for the ride. What did we do all that time? Nothing special, which turned out to be very special.
When we speak of our childhood we don't mean babyhood or toddlerhood or the first day of school. We mean that burst of mobility after the training wheels came off the bike (or in my case, after my sister gave me a push to get me started but neglected to tell me how to stop). The speed! The rush of wind in your face! The thrill, the terror, and finally (after a few bad spills), the sense of control; of knowing just how tight you could take a corner and not crash. That's classic childhood, between the ages of, roughly, 7 and 13, that passes so quickly and lingers forever in perpetual summer.
This is the territory that novelist Michael Chabon recalls in a recent essay in The New York Review of Books: disappearing for long summer days of unstructured time and uncharted neighborhoods through which he was allowed to get his own bearings and find his own landmarks. Today, middle-class kids are shuttled to play dates, camps, and scheduled events at Discovery Zone. Even casual hanging-out gets organized. Rather than the haphazard camaraderie of neighborhood kids jointly deciding what to do, parents ferry Justin over unknown streets to spend the afternoon playing video games with Shawn.
What makes parents so fearful they can't let their kids off the reservation? Not rational concerns about crime—random kidnappings do happen, but on a ratio so small as to be negligible. Chabon believes parents have fallen prey to a "Consumer Reports" mentality, an aversion to risk, an anxiety due to 24-hour news cycles.
And guilt. Due to what? "The poisoned legacy of modern industrial society . . . the world of strife and radioactivity, climatological disaster, overpopulation and commodification." No mention of abortion, which became legal during the decade he was wandering in the wilderness of childhood.
Just about any ill wind can be blamed on a "climate" of greed or corruption, or a "world of strife" created by capitalists or Republicans. But millions of babies were terminated in the womb because of millions of individual choices, adding up to almost one-third of a generation erased.
Chabon makes an interesting comparison: "As the national feeling of guilt over the extermination of the Indians led to the creation of a kind of cult of the Indian, so our children have become cult objects to us, too precious to be risked." Children are not being "exterminated" except by abortion, but he shuffles the guilty feelings to other causes, even, ironically, overpopulation!
He may have touched the truth without realizing it. Once one accepts that a pre-born human has no inherent right to exist—that is, no rights an adult is bound to respect, that human is objectified. Rather than an independent person who must have freedom to grow and develop on individual terms, he becomes a project or an experience or a self-improvement program to be taken on when all conditions are right. One who will not grant the precariousness of life to an unexpected fetus may be less inclined to grant that precariousness to a 5-year-old on a tricycle. Someone who's so into control may find it hard to stop controlling.
Chabon tells of the thrill his own daughter experienced when learning to ride a bike, and the letdown when both realized there was no place he would let her go alone. "Even if I do send [her] out, will there be anyone to play with?"
There are a lot of reasons kids today don't come out to play. But we can't discount the fact that almost one-third of their peers are missing.
et-freaking-cetera.
As someone who grew up during the Fifties, I gotta say that contemporary America is utterly unrecognizable.
Yep. I have very fond memories of tramping in the woods behind my home in West Virginia with my dog and BB gun.
Now it’s walking in the park wishing I had brought my Glock.
Yes, those magical days when we roamed free on our "war ponies" (bicycles) fully equipped to play baseball at any gathering of sufficient size.
Nice little slam.
" . . . so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect."
Taney, C.J., in Scott v. Sandford (1857).
Missing siblings!! Couples are having fewer children - later in life and further apart.
Remembering the 50’s fondly, living in a small town - where families of multiple siblings ‘blended’ with others of similar age, sex and interest and overlapped into the local school which we all attended: TOGETHER!!!!!!
I don’t remember parents hovering or car-pooling or taking the kids shopping for anything. We had no TV - maybe movie matinees on Saturdays. Mostly, we made up our own games & adventures in the woods and on the beaches, where big kids taught small kids to swim and climb down out of trees safely.
no they never will....those were happy days for sure...
What makes parents so fearful they can't let their kids off the reservation?
Lawyers.
If kids did today what we did in 'the olden days', they'd all be in jail and the parents sued into poverty. A Bloody Nose due to 'a fight', is now a 2nd Degree Felony and the Jackpot for the parents.
(And CRIME is a concern. Today Perverts roam free thanks to liberals. And ... Lawyers!)
Practically every house on the street where I grew up had kids -- they were everywhere. And all that about playing in the woods, climbing ridiculously high trees, catching crawfish, and bicycling all over creation -- I did it.
That world is totally gone.
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“As someone who grew up during the Fifties, I gotta say that contemporary America is utterly unrecognizable.”
Yep, I was born in 60’s and grew up in an era where you could roam all day. We’d HAVE to be home at 5:25 to wash for dinner at 5:30. Dad was home at 5:15 for his shot and beer (stroh’s) and dinner exactly at 5:30. EVERY DAY! EVEN on Saturdays...
My children at 15 and 13 both did NOT experience the free spirit roaming we had but still hung out and still do in the neighborhood running around and getting fresh air. It’s not as bad as one thinks (at least where we live) but it is stiffeling to a degree. One thing we try to do is have dinner as a family around the table as much as possible. I’d say we accomplish that 4 to 5 days a week even with sports schedules...oh yes, we demand the kids participate in sports as much as possible...
Per members of my own family, the “pervs” were around back in the 1950s and 1960s, its just that it wasn’t “talked about.” Lord forbid a child accuse an adult authority figure (priest or teacher especially) of inappropriate contact...
One third?
2 million births a year.
2 million abortions a year.
Looks closer to half.
Thanks for posting this, it is fantastic!
It’s a different world. Our sons are 14 and 16. Our younger son has loved tramping around in the woods behind the house, and has trapped many crayfish from the stream and brought home salamanders and bugs. His older brother is more the book-reading sort and has spent less time playing in the woods. Unfortunately, we have a busy road and no real neighborhood, so they’ve missed out on the easy camaraderie I had in our 1960’s neighborhood full of kids. It has also bothered me that they couldn’t ride their bikes more. Bikes were our primary mode of transportation as kids, and they gave us a freedom kids today simply don’t have. With busy roads and aggressive drivers, their opportunities are limited. It seems silly to me that we have to load up the bikes on a rack to drive somewhere for a bike ride, but that’s the world we live in now. Our community is beginning to build more bike trails, so it will soon improve. Our boys will be in college by the time it’s really in place, but it’s a good development.
Ha! I did make the mistake of shooting at a fly on the front porch with my Daisy BB gun. The BB ricocheted from the cement porch and hit a neighbor girl just below the eye. Her Dad was a very prominent lawyer. God protected us from a lawsuit but He did not protect my bottom from the whuppin’ I got (and deserved).
There used to be a lot of stay-at-home mothers that would naturally (old-school motherhood, I guess) keep an eye on their neighborhood and the kids in it in summer. I'd guess most homes have working mothers these days.
Trying to keeps kids innocent has led many parents to isolate their kids from the immorality that may abound in other kids' lives on the tv or pc or video game or cell phone or other.
Many parents don't trust 'the village' to have their children's best interests at heart. The village has lost its common morality and family values.
Thank you, 'progressives'.
I grew up in the late 70’s early 80’s, the minute we woke up and went outside, my mom would lock the door behind us and then clean the house! “) We were expected to go outside and stay. Now my girls do go outside, ride the bikes, scooters, play with the neighbors, but I must admit they don’t have the free roam that I did, ( I rode my bike everywhere, store, railroad tracks, all over town) and it is because of too much information with the news.
Heck, in Phoenix, especially during the construction boom the roads were loaded with workers with no real identity, no citizenship and who knows what prior criminal records. Who is going to let their children loose under those conditions. Sure it's a rarity but that won't make you feel better if it is your child who disappears.
In my old hood in Chicago there was 'one' Perv. He was really just a gay guy and would cruise around in his Corvette (prolly harmless). But we all knew who he was, were he lived and told to stay away from him - we were told about him by our parents. And the Priests were Priests, not homos looking for an alter boy to fondle.
But back in the 50's and 60's you didn't have all these child kidnappings and murders of kids. That's what I really meant and was thinking by 'Pervs'. In that respect we were safe to roam the neighborhood from dawn till 'The Street Lights Went On'. And for sure there wasn't any Gang problems where you had to worry about someone's turf. Today in Chi there's 100,000 gang members, per the Supt of Police.
(I vaguely recall a thing called 'dinner', or 'supper'. But I was out playing baseball or football at that time and always missed it. Today that's 'child abuse'.)
I lived just outside the baby boom subdivisions in the early 60’s during my childhood. I, too, rode my bike a mile to the nearest fishing creek, 2 miles to the nearest store. I would also walk to that store so I could pick up soda bottles to get the deposit to buy a pack of Lance crackers and a Pepsi (once, I found enough bottles to buy a family pack of crackers!) Has anyone talked about forts yet??? Tree forts, bunker forts, any kind of fort that scrap lumber could build. The big mission was to get your hands on scrap lumber. Dirt bomb wars! I caught one in the eye. The babysitter washed the mud out with lots of water. Hooked my ear casting a line while fishing and I have lived to tell about it. Bounced my bike off a root then off a stump into a tree, no helmet, front wheel was a pretzel, still alive! BB holes in my bedroom wall that were disguised by busy wall paper. My brother and I were in our 20’s when we had to apologise to Mom when she found them when preparing the walls for painting. Ditto the crushed dry wall in the same wall from my baseball. Hid that with a picture. Cut grass with a push mower, delivered newspapers, labored for my bricklayer Dad on weekends periodically. I’M STILL ALIVE!!
Also, the playgrounds were polluted with basketball games going on. It was always a bummer to have the big kids hog the courts. Today, those same courts are empty. They are used next to never. I listen to young people talk. Its video games, video games and more video games. That is all. Who remembers Gorgo?
bttt
That's where some of us got our completely wrong sex education and learned to lie about our conquests too.
My brother and I had Nintendo growing up. But that was a rainy day kind of thing or we would play it for a half hour before bed time sometimes, too. It was new and didn’t take over our lives the way gaming systems do now. If it was sunny and warm, we were outside in the woods or riding our bikes to the neighbors, playing baseball in the yard.
One summer my brother and I built a tree house deep in my parents’ woods...it was a shaky and not totally stable thing, but it was our fortress and the coolest thing ever. And my parents never came out and yell that we were going to get hurt and shovel us back in the house. When Dad got home, he grabbed some extra beams and nails and helped stabilize it. We built a camp fire and roasted hot dogs.
It was the 1990’s—not that long ago—but it’s amazing for me how different things are for kids now.
LOL! We called dirt clods “grenades” because they would “explode” on impact! Competing clubs of kids (membership changing almost daily) would have “wars” ranging all over the neighborhood; acorns, and crabapples were our ammo of choice, which we collected in paper grocery bags. Our WMD (we didn't know that term) were black walnuts still in the husks, which we called “bowl-overs” because of what happened to anyone hit with one! Getting hit with one would also mean getting in trouble with Mom because the husks would usually break open on impact and leave a big PERMANENT yellow stain on anything they contacted.
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Obama Says A Baby Is A Punishment
Obama: “If they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby.”
Dang! You had almost as much fun as me. ;)
Kids are now a parental "project".....not human beings.
My kids were human beings. Climbed trees, rode bikes (without helmets), got hurt, learned, grew, and became risk-taking, but responsible adults.
But we never considered murdering them before they were born either......
"Once one accepts that a pre-born human has no inherent right to exist—that is, no rights an adult is bound to respect, that human is objectified. Rather than an independent person who must have freedom to grow and develop on individual terms, he becomes a project or an experience or a self-improvement program to be taken on when all conditions are right."
The current occupant of the Oval Office is described to a tee in those two sentences and the following sentence which I didn't include. Obama worked to defend killing just born alive children when a female came seeking to kill the child ... and he is exhibiting a pernicious penchant for not relinquishing that level of control over life by carrying out his plan to fundamentally transform America. His penchant for control over life will be extended to every age and every strata of society, the society which democrats have lusted to transform via societal engineering for lo these many decades that their evil has been openly displayed since via Roe v Wade / Doe v Bolton.
Scarily real.
My childhood is nothing like the ones kids have now. As described above - roaming the woods and fields, riding the bike down country lanes, getting lost even. All by myself much of the time. No one was worried about me, nor should have they been. In fact, such times were pretty much the only happy times of my childhood.
>>Per members of my own family, the “pervs” were around back in the 1950s and 1960s, its just that it wasn’t “talked about.” Lord forbid a child accuse an adult authority figure (priest or teacher especially) of inappropriate contact...<<
That is true but the difference is that we were not so PC that we can’t call a perv a perv. We didn’t worry about hurting their feelings or experimenting with children’s lives to see if a perv was “rehabilitated”.
I would love to let my kids roam the way I did. But if one checks our state sex offenders list for my zip, we have 26 in our burb of 2.2 miles. These are not 17 year old boys who had sex with a sixteen year old. The first one on the list is a woman who was convicted of “Sexual Abuse with a minor 8 or under”
Until we stop releasing repeat sex offenders into the neighborhoods, my kids stay with me.
I had a Sears brand tank bicycle (one speed, coaster brake, weighed a ton compared to today's bikes) with a basket, and when I would go out selling greeting cards door-to-door I used to pick up the glass drink bottles from the ditch and bring them in to the country store for the deposit. Can't remember now if it was 5 or 10 cents per, but it didn't take many to get a drink of my own and a nice snack in the middle of the day.
And the forts...hoo, boy, we took a family trip to Fort Sumter one summer, and for months after everything in sight was "Fort Something-or-other". Too warlike and threatening for our times.
Dirt clod wars...I developed a technique of lobbing those overhead mortar-style with pretty good accuracy. When I teamed with one or more kids using a direct-aim method, it made our attack unstoppable. You could dodge the ones coming straight at you, or the ones dropping down from directly overhead, but not both — you can only look one direction at a time.
Nowadays, nobody ever sees bare dirt. The runoff pollutes, doncha know...<sigh>
Selling door to door . . . kids just don’t do that anymore. My girlfriends and I would make potholders and sell them. We also sold Girl Scout cookies. Back then it was all ordered ahead - no impulse purchases of cookies in the box. Our elementary school playground was available for shooting off model rockets, basketball, flying kites, etc. In the summer, a few local teenagers were hired to work at the playground distributing sports equipment to kids who came to play. It was my first summer job. My friend’s dad ran the program, and we spent our days teaching little kids to braid lanyards or weave potholders. The older kids played baseball or basketball. Very relaxed. It was a creative, low-budget way to keep the youngsters occupied during the summer months. The bookmobile came once a week, in case we ran low on summer reading. Back then, the outdoor drinking fountain on the side of the school still worked . . . a nice cold bubbler. Good memories.
The clod that got me in the eye was lobbed mortar like. I was throwing mine straight and looked up just in time to get hit. Your name isn’t Glen, is it?????
I’m ashamed to admit that I was one of those helicopter parents, always around and rarely letting them out of my sight. They didn’t walk to school or even to friend’s houses. To be fair, there were no kids their age close to us at the time.
When I was a kid there were hundreds of kids around. Every family was large, with seven kids we were considered a small family! There was always someone to play with and something to do.
Any one ever play flashlight tag? Played at night, we hid throughout the neighborhood, under porches, in trees and bushes, under cars. What fun.
I once told my kids that when I was a kid we had very few things, but we had a lot of freedom. They on the other hand had very few freedoms, but a lot of things.
Not guilty (this time). Sounds like somebody else had the same idea. I knew nobody else that did it myself.
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"It is the duty of every patriot to protect his country from its government"
--Thomas Paine
Very well put.
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