PLAYING ON CONCRETE

Recently, the US Postal Service was about to issue a postage stamp, which was in conjunction with the First Lady’s campaign to get kids to exercise more. The stamp depicted a girl swinging a bat and a boy doing a handstand, with bare hands! One boy is on a skateboard wearing a helmet, but no knee pads, and a girl stretching on a rock. Apparently the rock looks slippery.

Un-named members of the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition raised an alarm with the Postal Service about the issue of no gloves, slippery rocks and no kneepads. The US Postal Service immediately pulled the stamps from distribution!

America is becoming sissified, and the parents of today are the reason. Overly sensitized schools are banning baseball or football or hockey playing of any kind on school grounds because the ball or puck is too hard, someone might get hurt!

I was 5 years of age when my mother turned me loose on the world and said to go out and play. Where did my friends and I play? Right in front of my house: on the concrete sidewalk. Mom wasn’t waiting by the door with a band-aid, Dad wasn’t drawing up legal papers to sue the city if I scrapped myself, which I did everyday, more than once on some days.

All my play clothes had rips in the knees, blood on the shirt and dirt everywhere, but not once did I go crying to ‘mommy’ to fix me. No, instead I got up, said ‘ouch’ and went on playing. Things healed so new scars could be made. Today I sit here in one piece, fully healed and can accept pain with ease.

I arranged my own play dates, found my own friends and did my own fighting, and once again: today I am in one piece!

In my school, corporal punishment was not too removed from capital punishment, and mom and dad often reminded me that if I needed it in school, I would be receiving the rest when I got home! Today the teacher taps you: off to court we go, thank you mommy and daddy.

Today the parents, schools and even the laws have become ‘sensitive’ politically correct and bending over backwards to be what they call politically correct. There was no such thing back in the 1950’s, insensitivity came with the scrapes and scars of childhood, the threats of corporal punishment and the worst thing that could happen would be your friends laughing at you because mommy came along to protect you! I was called everything in the book, and returned in kind those same racial monikers and slurs, but in site of it all: no one went home crying to mommy, and if you did, don’t ever go out on the streets again! We learned what the real world had in store for us, and how to cope with pain.