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Congratulations!
You have finally landed on the one page on this entire site (and on the entire internet for that matter) that is purely without bullshit... my soapbox page. There are a lot of times during our show that, whether it's because of time constraints and other obligations, I don't always get to address some issues that I feel don't get the attention they deserve. There are even more times when I just don't feel like waiting until the show the next day to get some things off my chest. Thus, I have started the "Rob's Soapbox" page. If you have clicked on this page looking for someone to coddle your fragile sense of self-esteem, or tell you what you want to hear or to reinforce your outdated world view, then exit this page right now and go somewhere else. If you are in search of the last forum for reason and common sense left in the world, then sit back, relax, and enjoy. I make only one promise with this soapbox page... if you read long enough and often enough, you will eventually be offended. So here's my latest soapbox. Listen up, 'cause you just might learn something... |
October 16th, 2005
THE EMPOWERMENT OF OUR CHILDREN; THE TRUE HORROR OF HALLOWEEN
Over the past 20 years our society has done a shamefully brilliant job of empowering our children in areas that are meaningless while simultaneously overprotecting and coddling our children in the stages of life that truly do matter.
We coddle and overprotect our children by making them believe there is a pedophile around every corner. We force them to wear helmets and knee pads when riding their bikes, and we never let them out of our sight. In these ways and so many others, we make our children into grown-up scared whiny pussies.
We empower our children in meaningless ways by creating achievement parties based around things that are not even accomplishments, most notably, graduation ceremonies for elementary and middle school. How tripe. Additionally, we give kids trophies in youth sports for "trying," so that we can re-enforce the completely inaccurate belief that as long as you try your hardest, that's all that anyone can ask (no... what we ask, what we demand in the real world, is that you succeed).
Nowhere is society's hypocritical and wrong-headedness more on display in the arena of raising America's children than on Halloween night.
Let's begin with the coddling, shall we? When I was young (yes... that's right, back when stamps were a nickel and I had to wear dirt as a Halloween costume) we ganged up with 3 or 4 friends and went trick-or-treating. Dear God, my parents would be arrested in today's world if they had the audacity to allow such independence on their child's part. For every one trick-or-treater this year you'll be able to count at least two adult chaperones, a security guard and one get-away vehicle parked down the street just in case, because, remember... there is a pedophile around every corner.
Once the fun night of having the parents walk around their children on leashes to protect them from this evil world is over, it's time to move on to stage two of the coddling, thus solidifying the false belief in our children's minds that all of society is to be feared; it's time to x-ray the candy. Thanks to two dirt-bags in the 1980s that actually put razor blades in apples, today's parents now believe that every Snickers Bar is laced with Anthrax and must be cleared by the F.B.I., or at the very least the local hospital X-Ray machine, before their child can eat it. Christ, why stop at Halloween? I think all of our food should be X-Ray-ed all of the time. (Mmmmmm, gamma rays are tasty.)
Before you write me silly letters with the phrase, "better safe than sorry" in them, please remember this... that phrase has been inducted in the Smithsonian Institute as one of the dumbest, misused expressions in the history of mankind. In this context, it is not better to be "safe," when the outcome is a grown adult who is afraid of the very world in which he lives.
Now, we move on to the empowerment part of Halloween that is totally misguided and sends children all of the wrong messages about life by giving them freedom and power in areas they have no business having such.
For starters, we have the fact that regardless of what day of the week Halloween falls on there is the built in fact that kids will be out far later and get far less sleep than other days. Okay, fine. Adults have situations like that all the time, in which on a "Tuesday night," for example, they attend a concert or a baseball game that winds up netting them a total of 4 hours sleep. The difference is that in the real world, when that adult gets up the next morning, they are expected to perform at their job at the same level as any other day. No special treatment... no exceptions. In today's "child-empowerment" world, however, Halloween has become a 2-day holiday. On October 31st, children who are still allowed to celebrate at school spend their days dressing like Goblins rather than learning English. Then, on November 1st, teachers literally plan almost NOTHING for their classes, because the children are "too tired." When I was young (back when roads weren't paved and we wrote our own textbooks), teachers gave tests on November 1st to teach us a life lesson. Not now. Now we teach kids that THEY make the rules.
Big surprise, by the way. Halloween's very premise is that of a day when Children are allowed to literally threaten adults. It's no wonder that kids today are such out of control rats with no respect for their elders when we encourage them on Halloween to behave like the world's biggest mob. Think of the phrase attached with Halloween; "trick or treat." This phrase is uttered by millions of children every year to grown, tax-paying strangers and implies nothing short of a terrorist attack. The translation of the phrase is this; "Give me something tasty and sweet or I will burn your house down." It's no wonder these children grow up saying "Your wallet or your life," we've taught them how to do it!
Think this is funny? Fine, laugh all you want. Just don't get made at me when your 8 year-old guts the family cat because you didn't let him watch "Shrek 2" for the 19th time.
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