Article Image

IPFS News Link • Children

The Cult Of Safety

• https://www.zerohedge.com, by Thomas Buckley

Discarded refrigerators prowled the land looking for unsuspecting eight-year-olds to gobble up.  GI Joes and Barbies, with the help of their little owners, were making out everywhere.

It is the 2020s.  Entire schools ban peanut butter and jelly sandwiches because maybe one kid might have an allergy.  Parents get visits from county protective services for letting their children play unsupervised in the park across the street.  Jungle gyms are an endangered species.  And third-graders are taught to not impose cisnormative constructs, let alone behaviors, on anyone or anything.

The odd thing is that the events described in the first paragraph (except the GI Joe one) were not actually happening on any grand scale.  The sad thing is that the events in the second paragraph are.
There has to be a middle ground.

Admittedly there were children – one assumes - who did manage to trap themselves inside random refrigerators, hence the televised public service announcements (seriously, and such a seventies solution) asking the public to at least take the handle off of the appliance before heaving it over an embankment or leaving it in a burned-lot in the Bronx.  And admittedly – again, one assumes – a child somewhere somehow managed to get themselves tangled up in a dry cleaning bag.  As to the bucket problem, that one is rather hard to fathom but it must have happened at least once to spawn the lawsuit that forced manufacturers to put drowning warnings – complete with a graphic depiction of the inept toddler – on their buckets.

Whether it was caused by the misadventures of Darwin's children, the ever-burgeoning personal injury litigation field, a cherry-picking sensationalist media, humanity's inability to comprehend statistics or some combination thereof, society has clearly shifted drastically from a relatively laissez faire approach to common hazards to - not just a risk aversion or risk reduction model – the codified elimination of risk.


ContentSafe