It’s a common refrain: We have bubble-wrapped the world. Americans in particular are obsessed with “safety.” The simplest way to get any law passed in America, be it a zoning law or a sweeping reform of the intelligence community, is to invoke a simple sentence: “A kid might get hurt.”
Almost no one is opposed to reasonable efforts at making the world a safer place. But the operating word here is “reasonable.” Banning lawn darts, for example, rather than just telling people that they can be dangerous when used by unsupervised children, is a perfect example of a craving for safety gone too far.
MORE
I remember playing with lawn darts when I was a kid at a family reunion. We had the circles on opposite sides of the creek bed throwing the darts overhand for the distance...
ReplyDeleteKaren is scared. Karen has lived all her life in a safe suburban upper-middle-class bubble and reminders of this fact give Karen badfeelz. Karen's coping mechanism is to seek control over people who actually CAN cope. Karen believes she has "a right to feel safe" that trumps history, custom, law, culture, and the Constitution. Karen wants to burn the Constitution when she's afraid, partially because "somebody should DO something" and partly out of the spite Karen feels for people who can cope when she can't. Forcing the rest of us to live in Clown World only makes Karen feel a little better, for a little while, but it's all she's got. This is why Karen wants to do things again that she knows don't work, but HARDER. This is also why every tiniest iota of power, real or imagined, that Karen has go straight to her head. When Karen gets any kind of power she turns into Elena Ceaucescu and she WILL NOT STOP until she is forced to stop.
ReplyDeleteSooner or later, as a country, we're going to have to tell Karen NO. What form that may take, I know not. I don't have a crystal ball. I think it's not going to be pretty, though.
hell i remember standing up in the front seat of my mom's car, maybe 5 or 6 y/o. when she hit the brakes, i flew face first right intro the steel dashboard. she just said "told you to sit down ,didn't i? now don't get blood on my damn seats." reality 101. i said yes ma'am.
ReplyDeleteWOW, that's a good article. Thank you for pointing me at that. Addresses the COVID-19 thing in the context of the larger cultural movements of the last forty years, etc.
ReplyDeleteVery nice.
There comes a point of diminishing returns, where you are so safe, it is dangerous.
ReplyDeleteJunior high, spent a lot of time playing lawn darts with a friend in the '80s. Until I put one in the hood of his mother's Cadillac.
ReplyDeleteAfter that we had to settle for throwing a rusty piece of sheet metal at each other to see if the could get it to stick in the baseball bat.
Good times.