Published: February 10, 2011
Op-Ed Contributor
Forbidden Pleasures: The Fascists of Safety Are Over-Protecting Our Youth
By Charles G. Mills
GLEN COVE, NY - When we were very young, two of my sisters and I played a game in which we had alternate identities with magical powers. These powers were strongest in our "magic mist," which was my father's study in the morning before all the stale cigarette smoke from the previous night had been aired out.
One of my sisters has pointed out the impossibility of her granddaughter ever enjoying the pleasure of playing in a stale-smoke-filled room. This little girl will never be able to imagine a smoke-filled room in a "magic mist" for two reasons: we have abolished smoke-filled rooms, and we have abolished the pleasures of childhood.
Although smoke-filled rooms do not have magic powers, they did have the power to produce solutions when filled with politicians. Perhaps they stimulated the imaginations of politicians the same way they stimulated the imaginations of children. Such rooms supposedly caused cancer, but neither I nor my sisters has cancer although we are all about 70 years old. There is no objective evidence that being in smoke-filled rooms increases the chance of contracting cancer.
The smoke-filled room needed a second ingredient to be a childhood pleasure - imagination. There is, however, a war being waged today on the imagination of children. More and more of their time has been redirected from unsupervised and creative play to planned, orchestrated play, often containing a disguised element of indoctrination.
Kindergarten starts earlier in life and lasts longer in the day. Extracurricular activities in elementary school consume most of their free time. Truly free time to simply play with other children is now scheduled down-to-the-minute and days ahead of time. Organized sports are extended to younger and younger children.
In tandem with the war on spontaneous imaginative play is the related war on childhood innocence. If small children are force-fed the knowledge appropriate to adolescents, the ability of children to let their imaginations run wild is diminished. The imagination of small children is unique. If they are as sophisticated as adolescents, their imaginations will resemble those of adolescents. If seven-year-olds are directed in class by their teacher to simulate sex, their imaginations will be directed there rather than to child-appropriate interests.
The abolition of smoke-filled rooms was not just an attack on childhood pleasure and childhood imagination; it is part of the safety obsession that is actually an assault on liberty. When I was a child, children simply got on their bicycles whenever they wanted to do so. Now they are required to put on helmets, knee pads, and other armor. I remember being hit in the head by a baseball, but it never occurred to me that this was anything other than the normal progress of the game. Today, the young play baseball in helmets.
The Boy Scouts of America teaches young men how to use knives, ropes, fires, and rifles safely. Most of the rifles are classic BB guns. The BB gun was once a standard toy of most boys in the country. The safety fascists have diminished BB gun ownership by local laws. Most schools no longer allow Boy Scout knives in school, and they enforce this prohibition by draconian punishment. Kindergartens certainly no longer provide rope for the cowboys to tie up the Indians at recess as did my kindergarten.
Boys no longer attempt to set each other's forts on fire while playing war as my father and his friends did. So we deny children the exciting smell and look of a smoke-filled room. We deny them time to invent their own games. We protect them from the normal bruises and scrapes of play. We disarm them from the normal boys' knives in schools and public buildings. We plan all their play. We fill their minds with sex. Instead, in the words of Pink Floyd, we should "Leave those kids alone."
Charles G. Mills and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, www.fgfBooks.com. All rights reserved. Charles G. Mills is the Judge Advocate or general counsel for the New York State American Legion. He has forty years of experience in many trial and appellate courts and has published articles about the law.
* The views of Opinion writers do not necessarily reflect the views of NewsBlaze
Search News
