Sometimes protection becomes wretched excess

How many of you, when you were very young, got to sit in daddy’s lap when he was driving down the highway, and got to turn the steering wheel just a little bit so you could pretend you were driving?

Many, I suspect. And equally many, I suspect, grew up with family cars that boasted no seatbelts. Family cars in which you would stand up on the back seat during long road-trips, fight with your siblings until you were hit with the old: “If I have to stop the car and come back there, there are going to be some sore butts.” Excuses like, “… but … Janey hit me!” never worked. “Let’s play a game,” said Mom, attempting to defuse whatever carnage might follow if the misbehavior didn’t cease.

Anyway, I am only mentioning vehicular travel from days of yore in reference to a new decree from our ever-burgeoning ‘nanny-state’ here in Canada, which is directing parents to install kiddie booster seats for all kids under nine, or 4-foot-9 as the case may be. Booster seats? When I was very little my dad had an old van in which my place of posterior resting was an old jump seat tied down to the floor with ropes. The thing used to move around all over the place. Yet, I seem to have lived to tell the tale.

Don’t get me wrong. Our highways and byways are much more crowded now; vehicles move at a more rapid pace, and I suspect the quotient of morons behind the wheel has soared. So, such things as seatbelts probably do save a lot of lives. We likely were excessively cavalier in the past.

But, booster seats at the age of nine? Can you imagine the mortification? Can you imagine the conflicts between nine and ten year olds? Nelson-like “Ha-has” would be abundant. Added to which, it’s all a bit arbitrary, isn’t it? I mean, the height thing. What about really short adults? Would the Danny DeVitos of the world have to drive sitting in a booster seat? Or, what about the under nine kid who happens to have undergone a premature growth spurt and is 5-foot-3. Is he off the hook?

My point is this. We cannot be so excessively protected at the expense of all our liberties, and why are we granting the state the right to interfere at this level? I do not envy parents. They can no longer hit their kids, they can’t find a playground in which the equipment hasn’t been either removed or “nerf-isized”, they cannot buy fireworks because a kid was once injured by one, and so on and so forth. We should be wary of those draconian decrees all in the name of “protection” because we end up giving the hand-wringers power they’re not entitled to. They tell us it’s all in the name of our health and our safety; with the implied message being that we are too stupid to figure out things for ourselves. Well, if we are that stupid, maybe that element in the gene pool should be eliminated. We learn from our mistakes, not from decrees.

As a final question in this realm, however, I have always wondered this. If we are so concerned about the safety of our kids, and if we applaud such things as booster seats, why are kids permitted to ride bicycles in traffic? Why are kids permitted to ride skateboards on our streets? Why are cuddly ‘green’ parents permitted to tow their tots in those little trailer rigs behind their bicycles out amidst the semis and buses on crowded streets? Those rickety things are legal, yet we must have booster seats for our under nines?

Something is amiss in the nanny-state logic department. I’d say some more logical ‘fretting’ is called for.