Thoughts for Thursday

I decided I’d give Thoughts for Thursday a try. My thought is why are we so scared. When I was a kid I was let loose and had to be home at 6pm for dinner and at the curfew whistle 9pm in the winter 10pm in the summer. Our neighborhood stretched across about a mile along a highway. If we were up to any shenanigans, parents would be getting a call. Everyone knew who everyone was, and you knew who the “strange” ones, i.e. pedophiles,were and were told not to go near their homes. We didn’t have traveling squads for everything, unless you made the all star team for little league, which was at the end of the season. We had pick up games for baseball and basketball. We had regular forts in the summer, and snow forts for snowball fights in the winter. We played king of the hill and had a ice skating rink in our park. We actually used the park, we would swing high, flip off the teeter-totters, and get that merry go round going so fast someone was sure to get sick. We rode our bikes everywhere, there were no rides places, if we wanted to go swimming it was a 2 mile bike ride to the flowage with seaweed and leeches, not to the pool, that has to have a waterslide. We used this thing called our imagination and pretend to be anything and everything. We did have Atari but it didn’t consume our lives. We camped out in back yards, climbed trees, and played flashlight tag. What has happened in the last 15 yrs that we now seem to live shuttered up in our homes, afraid to let our children out because they are going to get kidnapped and molested? Why does every sport have to be run through an organization to be fun, or worthwhile? I told someone I was going to have the boy, 11, walk 2 blocks to the middle school in the dark, 6:30pm in the winter, to basketball practice and they thought I was crazy. Seriously have we become that scared we can't have a kid walk two blocks. Or have we become that busy that we can't get to know anyone anymore. I'd much prefer my backyard neighbor to come talk to me about her concerns about my dog, than calling the cops, which I'm sure have better things to do, like fight crime, than be bothered with my dumb dog. I worry that my daughter will miss out on all the fun I had as a kid.