This post by Evil HR Lady about finding vending machines in Luxembourg that offer condoms, dirty magazines, cigarettes, candy, and beer is a reminder of just how wimpish we've become here in the States.
She even shows a shop where booze is on a shelf right next to children's toys; just the sort of commercial exploitation of impressionable young minds that would launch a stack of doctoral dissertations on the cultivation of future alcoholics.
What has happened to us?
You hear of elementary schools where parents cannot bring in cupcakes to celebrate a child's birthday. [There's a great lesson in freedom.] I wonder how those rule-makers would have felt about my politically incorrect elementary school where our annual fund-raiser was a buffalo barbeque or my high school's gym with a rifle range in its basement or my college dorm where students who were - get this - hunters had the audacity to keep shotguns and rifles in their rooms and no one even blinked.
I work in an office complex in which the owner and the secretary of a small accounting firm have to puff their cigarettes outside the building because they can no longer smoke inside their own offices even when there are no visitors. [Ah, but there's such an aura of safety and superiority seeing them out there in all sorts of weather, catching the fumes from passing cars.]
This is crazy. In an absurd quest to remove all risk, we've been eroding three important concepts: freedom, courage, and accountability.
If some people want to drive an old lousy mileage car, read dirty magazines, eat cheeseburgers, smoke, go hunting or bring cupcakes to their child's birthday party, that should be their choice. If others want to drive a Prius, read Proust, eat tofu, not smoke, not hunt, or bring carrot slices to the kid's birthday party, that's fine too. It's called freedom.
The fear that something bad might happen, that if you give a kid a cupcake you'll be creating a fattie or that an occasional cheeseburger might cause you to flame out at 70 as opposed to 73 or that if some hunter has a shotgun in a dorm room we'll have another Columbine is the sort of fear we should be disdaining, not promoting. We should be stressing personal accountability instead of embracing a smothering mentality of "We know what is good for you better than you do."
It is time to celebrate courage and boldness instead of timidity and cowardice. Let's start by operating with the presumption that people can make - and live with - their own choices.
Freedom. What a concept.
2 comments:
They're trying to make children of us all. And with many of us they're succeeding.
I found it surprisingly difficult to respond to this apparently obvious post.
I love the idea of using Europe as an example against nannyism. you might find the average European's views on arming our neighbours with deadly weapons unpalatable. In general, compared to the stereotypical American we are pro sex and anti violence. But we tolerate an astonishing amount of interference in our private lives.
It is clearly stupid to try and eliminate all risk. In our paranoia we wrap ourselves in metal cocoons, keep our kids indoors and generally minimise any residual risk that they might become healthy (physically or mentally). Your examples are good. I find it intolerable that we are afraid to let our kids onto the streets on bicycles for fear (largely but not totally imagined) of what some stressed mum in her SUV might do to them.
Whilst the mum is entitled to drive the vehicle of her choice, I too am entitled to point out to her that she is making the roads more dangerous for my children. She may have a good reason. In a grown up society we would have a direct discussion.
So I agree about the infantile fear of risk.
But.
We also need a consensus about some aspects of the sort of world we want to live in. If we our roads are full of cyclists, motorists will get frustrated. If they are full of fast moving cars, cyclists and pedestrians will have a tough time. If we make a mess of the planet now, our children will have a tough time.
This is not a question of freedom vs (illusory) safety. Some choices simply need to be made, actively or passively. The question is, how do we decide what is acceptable and enforce it?
Some would say that this is exactly what government is for. But this is a smoke screen in a democracy, where the mob is supposed to be in charge anyway.
Robust discussion and campaigning to win hearts and minds seems to me to be the safest approach, even if we have to struggle on without the comforting smack of firm leadership.
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