As IF Times

link Lenore Skenazy: Whatever Happened to Walking to School? – WSJ.com.

A sentiment which is probably shared by most of my admittedly older generation.  But I also add that we chopped wood, fed the animals and drew water from the well before our mile long jaunt to school.  Uphill of course, both ways.  In a related article from a  little while back,       http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/37399539/ns/health-behavior/      there is an obvious pattern of smothering the current generation of children and ironically creating young people that are ill-equipped to deal with life’s vicissitudes.

At some point over the past few generations, it became unseemly to make kids endure ‘hardship’, whatever that definition means.  For some kids, hardship may mean working at a part time job to help with school costs, whereas for others, it may mean appearing at school in the BMW instead of the Mercedes.  The consequence of over parenting is a society of people somewhat insulated from the realities of life.  Suffering is an abstract notion. 

Kids should suffer.  In all of the animal kingdom, at some point, the progeny gets pushed out into the cold hard world and the cycle repeats itself.  You don’t see birds bringing  worms to feed middle aged birds in the nest.  You don’t see lionesses bringing  freshly caught wildebeest to teenage lions at home.  Unlike the natural animal world, humans, at least in western society, have moved towards sheltering their children from every imaginable event that can cause harm.  The result is a world full of people like Prince Charles of Windsor, wholly out of touch with reality and insisting on the Grey Poupon at dinner.

It’s really debatable whether the world is a more dangerous place for kids now than in the ’50’s or 60’s when kids were allowed to be kids and not faberge eggs requiring delicate handling.  It’s a wonder that Johnson and Johnson stays in business given that collapsing skinned knee incidents must mean the implosion of band-aid demand.  Nowadays, a cut finger means a trip to the local hospital, a fee to the HMO and a week’s rest in bed.

Admittedly, my comments are a bit self serving.  I’m annoyed that the charming days of cheap child labour to mow lawns, paint garages and washing cars are gone. As well, the cleaning of chimneys has to be done by hired professionals.   Oh well, maybe they’ll be kind to us when choosing our retirement homes.

link Unions Spurn Democrats Seen as Turncoats on Health, Organizing – Bloomberg.com.

Some may remember the 1974 movie Blazing Saddles, rife with comedy which would never be acceptable by today’s PC standards.  In one of the scenes, the black sheriff played by Cleavon Little is surrounded by hostile white men in a bar.  Seeing no way out, the sheriff points the gun at his own head and commands, “stop, stay right there or the n—–r gets it.  This is exactly the same tactic the unions are threatening to employ against the Democrats for the  upcoming elections.  Apparently, the unions will snub the Democrats whom they helped elect  because there was no quid pro quo once the legislators took office. 

The worst kept political secret in the U.S. is the dependable support by the big labor unions of the Democratic party.  Despite the claims of the unions as representing the ‘working’ people, the reality is, the union movement has done more harm to the cause of ‘working’ Americans via their demands on employers than any imagined oppression by them.  What the union movement has become and there’s no attempt to even disguise it, is a political action group dedicated to the interests of those few in the union hierarchy.  The union movement and the Democrats are the Chucky siamese twins of politics.  Both are fans of submitting to a hierarchical power structure which regulates and dictates people’s activities and their incomes without regard to any economic reality. In the 2004 national elections, it was estimated that large labor unions spent $65 million dollars in order to try to defeat George Bush.  Maybe that money would have/should have been spent on the poor workers instead?  Oh and the bosses get paid pretty well too.  From the Human Events website comes this list of top salaried union bosses, http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=21533

This is interesting because the percentage of workers belonging to a union has fallen from about a third in 1950 to barely 12 percent today according to Fortune Magazine.  As a very crude measure, it’s difficult to say that the U.S. is worse off now than it was in 1950 despite this downtrend in union membership.   Actually, there is practically an inverse correlation, but that’s admittedly a tenuous link and perhaps an idea for someone’s PhD thesis.  You could however easily make a case for the obsolescence of the union movement entirely, certainly as a champion for the ‘people’.  If someone were to connect the dots on how many jobs and industries have been hampered, extinguished or moved overseas because of union intransigence, they’d be lucky to have any members.  The woes of the auto industry are just the most recent examples of this. 

As an aside, in a delicious piece of irony, the reverend Jesse Jackson had his big SUV stolen and stripped while he was in Detroit giving a speech promoting ‘green’jobs.  http://www.detnews.com/article/20100903/MIVIEW/100903001/1467/opinion01/Payne–The-irony-of-Jesse-Jackson-s-stripped-SUV

 The green movement as we know, helped to kill the manufacture of big SUV’s, exactly like the one he was driving.  Oddly, he was not driving a Prius.  So the people who helped to kill an entire industry are now promoting their next big union idea.  Guess what, they’ll need government help to get it going. So getting back to the unions threatening to pull support from Democrats in the upcoming elections?  As if.