by El Zorro Viejo (aka; Jim)

Just picked up the mail, and, there, in amongst the bills and catalogues, was this month's EZ Shopper coupon booklet. I love to go through these to see what local businesses are pushing this month. Besides, the local Red Tower II fast food joint has coupons for "buy 2 get 1 free" Texas weiners (you have to be from this part of central Jersey to appreciate this.) But, I digress. This month, in amongst the cell phone service, pizza joint and landscape/home renovation deals, I found the following ad:

A cool exercise program where fitness is made FUN for ages 6 to 16....ACE Certified Instructors specializing in Youth Fitness. For no obligation trial class call...

When I was a kid, this sort of thing would have never even gotten off the ground. Most of my friends and I were simply not allowed in the house after school unless it was raining. We usually went over to Como's or Baker's or my backyard to play either baseball or football. These were strictly pickup games without any vestige of adult supervision, and, as far as I can remember, there were no broken bones or other serious injuries ever. If we weren't doing that, we were over at Newberry's having war games of some sort (usually involving throwing acorns at each other) in his woods (a couple of acres of woods that ran down the middle of his block.) When the weather was warm, we were on our bikes exploring the region. I can remember a couple of 10+ mile bike trips when I was in 5th and 6th grades.

Today I understand none of this is true. Kids make play dates which are supervised by parents in one form or another. More often than not, kids are inside playing video games, messing around on the computer or just watching TV.

I know I'm not the first to decry this, but that ad really hit a nerve. Kids should be outside doing Tom Sawyer type stuff. That's how they learn about this world and how to live their lives rather than live a surrogate existence via electronic games or passive TV watching. However, for this to be even possible, we adults have to make sure that the kids are safe outside. I know that the absolute percentage of predators in our general population has not changed much over the years. It is just that, because there are so many more of us, there are also so many more of them...and they are all operating in the same physical space that the fewer predators were operating in 45 years ago. The sad thing is that I don't have any solution other than to kill the predators whenever we find them. Maybe if the creeps know that they die when they get caught, they'll try harder to control those deviant impulses. Then again, they probably wouldn't...we'd just keep pruning the gene pool.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License. ©El Zorro Viejo 2002-2005