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June 25, 2006

Yearning For Saner Years Gone By

Way back when I was a kid {and I mean way} we weren't "overprotected". We did all the stuff you do at playgrounds over a concrete or pebble filled asphalt ground, monkey bars, swings, see-saws and all. No built-in rubber mats underlining whatever venue we were playing on. No bicycle helmets, knee pads and so forth. In the winter, we went flying down long hills of snow and ice laying prone on low slung, narrow wooden sleds on steel runners. We climbed trees, we built tree houses, we played with solid hardballs in Little League baseball, bashed the hell out of each other in Pop Warner football and bombarded each other with projectiles that were big rubber balls in games of dodge ball. We went to the local pizza shop and gorged large slices of thick, doughy Sicilian pizza and loved the heck out of enormous ice cream sundaes that housed every kind of fattening agent known to man. We dove off of high diving boards. We weren't mollycoddled by society, we were permitted to be kids.

Now, all is liability.

Liberal trial lawyers have managed to instill terror in the hearts of cities, states and business concerns -- the mishap that results from someone's clumsiness has become the fault of whoever owns the property on which an accident occurs. In many ways, similarly to the denutritionalisation of bread, they are bleaching a lot of the fun out of growing up....

Steve Moore of the Wall Street Journal sums it all up rather well, using as his vehicle the veritable extinction of... the diving board.

I'll leave you to it....

Posted by Seth at June 25, 2006 11:55 PM