By JEFFERSON WEAVER
Staff writer
“Aren’t you scared?” the lady asked.
I shrugged and replied, “Not really.”
In this case, the question was about poisonous snakes, but it’s easily applicable to almost anything nowadays. We are creating a nation of fraidy cats, and I don’t like it.
Sorry, folks, but I refuse to be a fraidy cat. That is not to say I am totally fearless, far from it. Fraidy cats are like Chicken Little, scared of their own shadows.
We despised fraidy cats when I was a kid (I know, because being despised as a fraidy cat helped me overcome the condition). Fraidy cats wouldn’t drink out of garden hoses, swim in creeks, or ride their bikes pell-mell down the big hills around the mill. On top of that, many of us had guns and fishing knives. We were even bitten by mosquitoes, and were sunburned brown by the end of the summer.
How did we survive?
Sunshine is now bad for you; the barest exposure to sunshine, say, while swinging on a rope over a swimming hole, or running down a beach being chased by an older sibling, is bad for children. Allowing children out in the sun, the studies suggest, is akin to a parent waiting 40 years to abuse a child, due to skin cancer and eye damage and for all I know, cooties.
Fish are bad for you now, too; I don’t mean just the polluted fish brought over here from China (That’s a column for another day) but virtually any fish, anywhere. If it comes from an old-fashioned fish market, the grocery store, or is caught by a little boy or girl learning how to use a cane pole, fish are bad. Can’t eat those fish, due to chemicals and what all.
Then there’s candy and sweet stuff. Now, I’ll admit that when I see hundred-pound second graders, I suspect a junk food problem, but that’s the parents’ fault, not the kid’s or the junk food manufacturer’s.
We ate plenty of candy, but we also ate plenty of healthy food, too, and we played outside in the sunshine, participated in contact sports which sometimes humiliated us, since we sometimes lost. We also played dangerous games on rusty swingsets and rode our bicycles.
Holy cow, bicycles. Those have to be banned.
I haven’t got that big a problem with helmets for little kids – a mild concussion from my days proving I didn’t need training wheels is a good explanation – but again, part of the reason kids get hurt on bikes is because their parents don’t always take the time to teach them the rules of the road.
Just the other day, I kid you not, I saw a child wearing elbow pads, knee pads, a blinking light, and a helmet. Skateboarding? Nope, she happily was riding her bike, without training wheels. It did, however, have a water bottle. She very carefully avoided riding past the end of her street.
All I could think of was the character development that came from skinned knees and scruffed elbows produced by learning to ride a “real” bike. Broken bones always, somehow, healed. We had no such things as pads and helmets, and our water came from whatever hose pipe was closest to the street.
Speaking of water – did you know it’s all polluted? Every last bit of it, even that which isn’t turned into such noisome substances as a reassuring cup of coffee, a comforting glass of sweet tea, or a refreshing cold drink pulled from a country-store cooler. All water is bad. There are tons of heavy metals, pounds of chemicals, and lots of nasty germs in that very bottle you’re drinking out of right now.
Heaven forbid you should ever stick your head under a pitcher pump and pull cold, clear water straight from the earth after a hot afternoon in a tobacco field. Never mind taking a big gulp from a garden hose – don’t you know that thousands of tiny bugs live in your garden hose?
Without proper government regulation and expensive permits, those bugs will crawl through your plumbing system or worse, pollute the global water supply. Horrors.
To all this I say, stuff.
Any reasonable person knows I truly am worried about the environment, I care deeply and passionately about the safety of our water, and I would never want to see a little kid hurt.
But folks, I’ll tell you plain – there’s a big difference between being concerned and being a fraidy cat. I’ve never seen a fraidy cat that was worth emulating or following, but yet we’re giving them control of just about everything. When fraidy cats are in charge, a bully will eventually come along and do what he wants – and the fraidy cats won’t stop him, since they can’t understand people who won’t be frightened.
Did fraidy cats settle the New World? Did fraidy cats back down when other, bigger countries threaten theirs, not to mention coming to the aid of those former aggressors when it was the right thing to do?
Did fraidy cats figure out how to mass produce automobiles?
Heck no.
Then why are we letting the fraidy cats take over? Are we destined to become a society of fraidy cats?
I certainly hope not; I know where there’s a pitcher pump that gives out sweet, cool water on the hottest August day. It isn’t far from a real good fishing hole on the river, although you have to look out for snakes.
Shoot, you could even ride your bicycle down there.
If you’re not a fraidy cat, that is.
Weaver is a staff writer at The News Reporter. He is not a fraidy cat. He can be reached at 642-4104, ext. 227, or via email at jeffweaver@newsreporter.biz.
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