Generally this is in response to the claim that because we pad sharp corners, children are therefor weak and uncool. As if playing Russian roulette makes you a better person somehow, and not merely a suicidal moron.
I was asked…
What in the world does wishing to be young and not fat have to do with the military?
Nothing. What I said was that making it seem like potential injury is somehow cool, on the assumption that it’s merely a risk, is the same logic used to make uniformed idiots feel safe despite being shot at.
The fact is someone usually will be shot in war, and someone will eventually break their neck on the playground. Safety innovations are not something to be made fun of, especially if it is your child that has to live out his life in a chair as a result of some guys rosy nostalgia, and cavalier attitude towards life.
I don’t need to actually have experienced the horror of having my neck broken to have compassion for my fellow man.
Today we live in a world were kids are becoming more and more obese, why?
Probably the presence of HFCS, hydrogenated oils, and other industrial toxins in the diet, along with the general social apathy of the populace, which I might add is contributed to by the cavalier attitude regarding health issues coupled with the culture of sex fear which simultaneously imprisons children, sky rockets teen pregnancy, and destroys health.
Look at diabetes rates, it’s not merely lack of exercise. The opinion that if we just forced children to go outside instead of playing games reading or communicating, everything would be all better, is simplistic and incorrect.
They’re eating mcdonalds all the time and sitting around playing video games. Playgrounds are built to encourage physical activity which is healthy.
They eat McDonald’s because it’s cheap and parents don’t have time to fix real meals because the economy is so bad that both parents have to work full time, on top of the fact that we demand so much of our children via school that they have almost no down time. When they do get down time they are exhausted and would rather not run laps.
We don’t let them go anywhere unless it’s to wear a short skirt and wave pom poms for the pleasure of balding middle age coaches, or beat each other up at some mindless ball tossing ritual based on sexual tension.
People typically know nothing of our society, because they are too close to the problem. Some are as blind and indoctrinated as can be imagined. Our children won’t be. They’ll get one too many passes with the metal wand on the way to history class and start asking the dangerous questions. Like, what does football have to do with math, what does patriotism have to do with chemistry, and what happens if we all say no more all at once?
Its not some sort of indirect way of recruiting kids into the military or something crazy like that.
Then what is the purpose of education in industrialized societies? What part of pledging allegiance to a flag and mandatory attendance being superfluous to knowledge acquisition is hard to grasp? Very clearly school is an indoctrination system. Even educators will admit this, though of course they won’t use such clear terminology . They will speak of teaching character traits and social skills, both of which are merely euphemism for obedience to the social order.
Limiting the ways kids CAN excerisize [sic] during recess or whatever (some schools actually tried eliminating recess) will only increase the amount of fat, lazy, obese people who do nothing but sit in front of the TV all day being indoctrinated by TV programming.
Putting children on human hamster wheels is no less mentally demeaning than plopping them in front of the propaganda box. Laziness is not a bad thing, laziness is simply the desire to get he most product for the least effort, which is otherwise known as efficiency. You may want to live in an Amish work addicted culture, but I do not.
For two fat is largely a dietary and genetic issue which stems directly from public tolerance of social abuses, such as toxins in the food supply, and the ultra high cost of non-toxic foods. We’re sheep because school trains us to be that way, and when we grow up we line up for our feed no matter what’s in it.
The real danger is when safety becomes a tool to oppress and exploit. The clearest most common example of this is the behavior of modern father’s towards their daughters. I find it repulsive that fathers are encouraged to act for all the world like jealous puritanical lovers.
Another grand example is when a government takes away from a populace all ability to defend itself and then sets about stepping on every basic human right under the guise of protection. It is no coincidence that the most surveiled city in the world is in the middle of a country that allows no guns.
Further it’s very easy to talk shit about someone else’s need to experience pain and risk from a position of comfort and safety.
