By: Jeff Katz – November, 2013
Do you remember back in the olden days when dinosaurs roamed the earth and we had to walk up hill to school…both ways? You know the age when we rode bikes with no helmets and swam without goggles.
There was a time when American kids were fairly sturdy creatures capable of running, jumping, throwing balls and catching them too. Young children ran around outside in an area called the playground. Sometimes the children fell and wound up with a skinned knee. Those silly little people often boasted of the minor nicks and cuts they got, even wearing them as badges of honor, proud of just how tough they were.
There was a game called “tag” that involved children chasing each other with the sole purpose of tapping another child, thereby anointing the other kid as “it.” That child would then run after yet another child hoping to tap them and pass on the awful moniker, kind of like one passes on fruitcakes at Christmas.
Well, thankfully these horrendous activities are no longer allowed to continue. No, not in our heavily protected modern age. And in that regard, I just wanted to take a moment and salute Patricia Beaulieu who is the Principal of Nashua, New Hampshire’s Charlotte Avenue Elementary School.
The good principal has reminded all of us just how delicate and fragile our modern children are by banning that old barbaric game from the grounds of her school. Citing concerns about injuries and possible litigation lest a child violate what the principal deemed the “no contact rule” while using the playground, tag is now verboten in Nashua. I hope the kids appreciate just how much safer they are today thanks to this exceptional educator. We can only hope that tag will soon be banned in every school district around America. I mean really, it is for the children, you know.
Let’s also pay tribute to the United States Postal Service for having the foresight to destroy millions of dollars worth of postage stamps which depicted children having fun while engaged in various athletic activities. Not just any athletic activities, but exceptionally unsafe things like riding a skateboard without kneepads and doing a headstand without wearing a helmet. Yes, the Presidential Council on Fitness and Sports decreed that children would be tempted to copy such risky behaviors if they were to gaze upon the stamps in question. Sure, you could argue that nobody under the age of fifty actually uses stamps anyway, but it is obviously better to be safe than sorry.
There’s simply no reason to expose the porcelain generation to anything which might scrape an elbow or ding someone’s self esteem. Thankfully, we now live in an age where our children can be ensconced in a roll of bubble wrap, stealing cars on a video screen where virtually no one ever gets hurt. Now if only someone would tell us what we should feed our children and when to feed them, then we’d be all set.