young people so frightened?
In a word, Leftism.
Hear me out: American cultural Leftism is ALL about litigation-inspired nanny state-ism. Don’t put this bread sack over your head–it is not a toy. Gee, it’s a good thing there is this warning–I thought it was a toy and putting it over my head might be a really fun thing…
See, a consequence of focusing with such hyper-vigilance on safety is that it renders ALL life dangerous. Don’t build a ramp and jump your bike on it.
And when I feel that ALL life is extremely dangerous, I might well feel chronically anxious. And that anxiety has grown explosively among our kids over the last 30 years or so. No surprise, there.
So you never play “Red Rover” (when we played it one time a friend’s little sister got her arm broken). You never play Smear The Queer (for obvious reasons). You certainly never build ramps and jump bikes over them.
And you never (speaking from experience) steal gunpowder from your dad’s reloading setup and make pipe bombs (yeah, that is just dangerous and MY parents would have had a freakin’ fit had they known).
As a teen, you never see if you can hit the railroad elevation fast enough that you get “air.” You never throw an old mannequin off a very tall bridge where all the traffic can see a “body” falling off the bridge!
I’m NOT endorsing doing stupid and dangerous things. Please, don’t misunderstand. I’m saying that if I had never “spun cookies” in snowy parking lots as a teen, slick roads would now panic me a lot more.
We need to understand that there is a trade-off here. We want our loved ones to be safe and sound. But going hard the other direction also poses some risks–which often fly “under the radar.”