It's standard issue kids today are weak and coddled, what they need are more beatings and head injuries from dangerous play structures like back in MY day! and follows the usual template- an appeal to personal vanity cloaked in nostalgia (YOUR generation had it way harder, but YOU toughed it out and came out ON TOP, not like those wussies nowadays, with their sissy bike helmets and gutless workplace protections!), an attempt to link morality to economic reality (if only everyone was good and hardworking like YOU, having learned the hard, necessary lessons of a deprived childhood with neglectful parents, the economy would be GREAT instead of weak and feeble, drained by immoral welfare recipients & food stamp moochers!), seasoned with numerous attacks on that great right wing hobbyhorse, TYRANNICAL REGULATION.
This quote tips the author's hand-
Injury prevention tips there include: “Have anyone who uses a mower or is in the vicinity wear polycarbonate protective eyewear at all times.”
I repeat. One tip was that everyone in the vicinity of a lawn mower should be wearing polycarbonate protective eyewear at all times.
Armed with the knowledge of the author's basic untrustworthiness, I made a quick trip to Google.
And hey, whaddaya know, lawnmowers are pretty damn dangerous, and not just for kids.
Contempt for facts in the hands of professionals is one of the hallmarks of modern conservatism. If the American Association for Pediatrics thinks kids mowing lawns should take precautions, then BY GOD we out to be mowing drunk wearing nothing but a a dirty tank top!
Here's more bullshit, shoveled by someone who's apparently never any time at all around small children:
David Frum eloquently pointed out one problem with over-protecting children in his book What’s Right. Reflecting on the hordes of preschoolers wearing helmets as they rode 1-2 miles per hour down the sidewalk, he wondered if his fellow parents hadn’t gone mad.First, tricycles are fundamentally UNSTABLE- hundreds of adults and kids die each year in ATV accidents, the adult version of a tricycle. Second, toddlers are STONE CRAZY, and not all that coordinated. It's really easy to over-steer a trike & go ass-over-handlebars, whatever speed you're traveling at. Also, because a kid is going "1 or 2 miles per hour down the sidewalk" at one particular moment doesn't preclude them doing something crazy and unforeseen in the next moment. Third, kids have soft heads. They don't need to be travelling at a incredible rate of speed to give themselves a concussion or worse.
The insistence that danger is ennobling, that not taking basic, commonsense precautions is somehow laudable & heroic, is ridiculous. "I survived a childhood of riding around without seatbelts, so NOBODY SHOULD EVER WEAR THEM" is the type of conclusion a moron would reach. A moron, or an ideologue struggling to give their dishonest, failed argument an appealing coat of paint.
But all this is deep, wise philosophizing compared to the next rasher of nonsense offered up:
Well, for starters, a parenting style that abjures risk at all costs may be at least partially responsible for the country’s economic doldrums
Followed by a link to a Wall Street Journal article, to assuage any lingering doubts you may have had that you were, in fact, reading a far right polemic disguised as an evenhanded essay. Although on that front I deduct style points for using limp-wristed weasle words like "MAY BE AT LEAST PARTIALLY".
She may as well just hold up a sign reading "I GOT NOTHING HERE, BUT JUST ROLL WITH ME FELLOW OBAMA HATER!"
Stripped of the nostalgic trimmings, the author is advocating child labor and deregulation as the cure for our economic malaise, and blaming our (deregulated) banker-demolished economy on parents who'd rather not see their children maimed & injured.
Awesome link, bro!
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