Go Ahead, I Dare You
link Super Spicy Snacks Send Kids to Emergency Room – ABC News.
The finger wagging nannies which increasingly run government and exert their influence upon the lives of the regular folk never seem to run out of things to regulate. Over the years, many simple and innocuous pleasures and activities partaken simply for their amusement or convenience have been done away with because someone thought the activity was too dangerous or too offensive.
Long gone are the days when you could just pile a bunch of your buddies, or your excess children, into the back of the pick-up truck for a ride to the beach. In most cities, it is now illegal to hop on a bike for quick trip to the store without first wearing a helmet. It is illegal to drive infants around in cars without approved car seats. I guess someone can make the case that wearing seat belts or not texting while driving through mountain passes may be good ideas, but do we need to expend untold amounts of money on police work to enforce this?
It’s the regulation of simple things that people do purely for self amusement or enjoyment that are annoying. We are familiar with nanny Bloomberg’s efforts to regulate the size of soft drinks at convenience stores as well as restricting the amount of salt allowed in food served at restaurants in New York. Who asked him to be the Jewish grandmother? It’s pretty much accepted by most people that once we become adults, we are free to pursue whatever happens to amuse us…to excess or otherwise. If we want to eat a block of cheese the size of a car battery and wash that down with enough booze to turn our liver into a solid, that should be our business. Frankly, if they want to regulate things for the good of people, they should control Justin Bieber and Miley Cyrus, both of which are far worse for the human condition.
The roots of this nanny-ism increasingly encroaching upon our adult lives may spring from the compulsion we have developed in modern western society to protect our children like Faberge eggs at every step of their lives. Everything is done to shield the young ‘uns from any and all harmful activities. Much of what passes as sports at the juvenile level these days is essentially paddy cake with uniforms. This is all misguided and runs counter to the natural pull of evolution. Kids, especially boys, want to do dangerous and competitive things, it’s in the wiring of the genes. Today’s children are way too restricted on their fun activities. From the dawn of time, kids have always found novel ways to amuse themselves. There’s a good chance that young Grog ate a bug or tried to grab a hot smoldering rock simply to amuse his cave-boy pals. Ever since then, kids have found innumerate ways to amuse themselves whether by setting explosions, jumping off high ledges, chasing wild animals or dating dangerous girls. So now, they’re worried about kids eating spicy foods? How wimpy are we?
Recently, we wrote about the so called sport of “longboarding” in which kids rode supine on long skateboards down steep public streets while dodging oncoming cars. People actually wanted to regulate this. I say let ’em do what they want. If we don’t allow Darwin to cull the herd, we wind up with a society full of idiots which then necessitates more dumb laws. Embracing risky behaviour will lead to some undesirable results certainly. In the extreme case, some hospital bills or maybe the odd death. The entrepreneurial ones achieve fame by making movies in the “Jackass” genre which are essentially chronicles of glorified self inflicted head and genital pain. Or we wind up at the other end with people like Steve Frayne, the guy who jumped off a space capsule to fall to the earth from the extremes of the earth’s orbit. We can argue that even Christopher Columbus was a bit of a nutter by sailing off into the unknowns of the world at the time. The point is, that while risky behaviour is dangerous, it is probably a manifestation of man’s desire to improve his condition. We don’t know what we can achieve unless we try it, or find someone crazy enough to try it. Think of the guy who first stuck his hunt of the day into the fire and created cooked meat. Think of the guy who ate the first raw oyster.
It’s a bit of a stretch to equate eating spicy chips to discovering America, but we can’t stifle the urge to take chances and to chase thrills. The only legitimate way to make it through the natural path to adulthood is to get a few bumps and bruises along the way. What kid hasn’t stuck their finger in an electrical socket. You’ll notice there are no laws prohibiting this activity. Of course, odds are, we’re going to lose a few along the way, but that’s nature. History glorifies the guys who took chances and achieved things, not the guys who stood around wagging fingers and making laws telling people what to not do. As well, most societies have their own mechanism to sort out the dumb and stupid; it’s called shame and ridicule. That’s a lot more effective than stupid laws.