How Did Anyone Ever Survive?

I was recently at a store and for some reason the shopping carts caught my attention. I looked at the cart and said to my husband, “You know, it just dawned on me that kids don’t sit in the big part of the carriage or ride along standing on the front anymore.” He just responded that people today don’t want their kids getting hurt. Everyone is afraid. If everyone is afraid today, no one was scared when I was growing up.

I used to ride standing on the front of the cart all the time. I rode in where the groceries are supposed to go until I was too big to fit in the cart. I still push the cart with a nice running start and then stand on the back and glide through the store. Yes I get strange looks, and no, I don’t feel the need to don a helmet. When I was a kid I never wore a helmet. Whether it was for a bike or for a nice roller skating run around the neighborhood, we just went for it. With no helmet or knee pads we would start at the top of a very large hill, hope we could stop ourselves when we got to the bottom, and didn’t worry about on-coming traffic. Somehow I made it through that fast and loose lifestyle with no cracked cranium and no broken bones.

This fast and loose lifestyle wasn’t just the whim of a kid, it was fostered by the family. Did my mom make me wear a safety belt in the car? No. Now, before anyone calls child services, she was nice enough to put her arm out in front of me when she had to come to a fast stop.  Times have changed.  A few days ago I saw a public service ad that said if your kid is under 48 inches they belong in a car seat. I remember my mom berating my dad because he let me sit in a car seat when I was old enough to walk. She said I wasn’t a baby anymore – time to suck it up and sit in the front seat without a seatbelt, like an adult. These were different times, a time when people took “one for the road,” cracked a beer nestled it between their legs with the kid in the next seat sans safety belt.  Could you imagine that today?

In recent years the push to end all public smoking has been unrelenting. In SoCal they don’t want you smoking on the beach, in public parks, any building and on your patio – because the smoke might waft to your neighbor. Growing up, people smoking everywhere were part of the deal. To hell with you if it made you cough or gave you asthma, you are a kid, so shut up and deal with it. I can remember many a car rides with my family where they would all be lighting up and it would be winter. I would be nicely situated in the back seat with two people chain smoking and me hacking up a lung. It was too cold to open the windows so the only option was to breath in the smoke. Somehow I survived without needing an iron lung by the time I was 20.

I don’t know, but it seams to me that society wants to put us all in a rubber room. I think letting people and kids do dumb things is good. It is sort of Darwin’s theory in action. Let’s weed out the ones who don’t make it through. Let’s throw caution to the wind, and ride in the basket of the shopping cart and see what kind of hell breaks loose.

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