The kids in New York have a great future to look forward to. No
Happy Meals and now possibly no wiffle ball or the dreaded
freeze tag. It's a wonder parents feel safe letting the little ones outside the house at all.
State bureaucrats have identified a potentially deadly hazard facing our children this summer - freeze tag.
That's right, officials have decided the age-old street game - along with Wiffle Ball, kickball and dodgeball - poses a "significant risk of injury."
And classics like Capture the Flag, Steal the Bacon and Red Rover are also deemed dangerous in new state regulations for day camps.
Steal the bacon? I thought that was what the pols do to us?
"It looks like Albany bureaucrats are looking for kids to just sit in a corner in a house all day and not be outside," said state Sen. Patty Ritchie (R-St. Lawrence County).
"I don't think Wiffle Ball is a dangerous sport."
Some look back nostalgically to the carefree days of the past.
Kimberly Baxter, 27, a medical assistant from South Ozone Park, Queens, said she played freeze tag with abandon as a youngster.
"I never got hurt, maybe scraped my knee once in a while but that was it," said Baxter, mom to a 1-year-old girl.
But how many more knees must be scraped before there's government intervention? How many more of the children must suffer?
The kids in New York have a great future to look forward to. No Happy Meals and now possibly no wiffle ball or the dreaded freeze tag. It's a wonder parents feel safe letting the little ones outside the house at all.
When I was a kid about 30 to 40 of us would grab our BB guns split up into teams and play war. Grenades were either large dirt clods or my favorite, inch and a halfers crammed into the base of those cheap platic chess pieces, which you could buy for 39 cents per bag, thus giving you 32 grenades complete with plastic shrapnel. LOL
ReplyDeleteOur rules were that you could only shoot the other guy in the legs or butt with the BB's and my Golden Daisy got a workout on Saturdays. It was most fun playing in the soon to be built new housing sections where only the water, sewer and basement areas were dug out of the ground, like WW1 trenches.
We were smart enough to wear eye protection and a helmet just in case:) LOL
Good times but never again for the kids now.
And with this well thought out idea another generation of FAT American kids are ready to hit the playgrounds, or at least what were once playgrounds. I bet todays kids must wonder what those quaint little iron bars in the sandboxes were once for.
ReplyDeleteAnd Jon's post reminds me of the dirt clod fights we used to have in Long Beach Kalifornia when I was a kid back in the sixties. We (my friends and me) would wait over at "the field" which was a large empty dirt lot and bombard the kids coming home from Saint Anthony's which was a Catholic school.
Of course my friends and I went to a public school (Lincoln Elementary) but the dirt clod fights weren't about religion but were instead rich vs poor. They had nice school uniforms and we didn't so it was easy to tell the "enemy" from the allies. I got clobbered more than once but it was just a part of growing up and I did manage to survive.
Now we're rasing a generation of children who won't even have the immune systems to stand up to a simple head cold because of this Nanny State bullshit. Our legacy to them is goind to come to fruition about three or four generations down the road when their lack of resistance to diseases begins to kill them via simple forms of viruses that barely gave us the sniffles. And today's medical experts KNOW this now and are doing jack about it.
I feel sorry for today's children. They will miss so much because of some nitwit and their idea of what's safe and what's not.