No children playing in America!
Depressing: According to a new poll, 68% of all Americans believe it should be illegal for kids to play unsupervised
Worse, almost half the population thinks these regulations should even apply to twelve-year-olds.
Last night Diane and I watched the classic 1945 Hollywood film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, about a young girl growing up in early 20th century Brooklyn. They live in Williamsburg in a neighbor packed with tenement apartments. The kids are outside all the time, on their own. No one questions it all. They in fact encourage it. The result: the kids quickly become self-reliant, smart, independent, and mature.
Since the 1980s American kids have increasingly been supervised every moment of their lives. The result today is a generation that fears freedom and wants it squelched wherever it exists.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Depressing: According to a new poll, 68% of all Americans believe it should be illegal for kids to play unsupervised
Worse, almost half the population thinks these regulations should even apply to twelve-year-olds.
Last night Diane and I watched the classic 1945 Hollywood film, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, about a young girl growing up in early 20th century Brooklyn. They live in Williamsburg in a neighbor packed with tenement apartments. The kids are outside all the time, on their own. No one questions it all. They in fact encourage it. The result: the kids quickly become self-reliant, smart, independent, and mature.
Since the 1980s American kids have increasingly been supervised every moment of their lives. The result today is a generation that fears freedom and wants it squelched wherever it exists.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
1945: Enforced segregation
2014: Enforced “Vibrancy”
That’s why.
Like it or not.
Please explain Shibes.
Damn glad I taught my son how to hunt and fish.
I found him his own shotgun and off he went. Him and 4 friends would go off to the woods hunting with just one of us adults along to keep the state happy about supervision. They cleaned and ate what they hunted without any help.
At 18 they all started going deer hunting alone.
I never yelled at them for coming home a little late all covered in mud or soaked to the skin from the river or rain.
They are all healthy, happy and strong.
Never had a single problem from him or his friends.
Well a few fights and an angry parent of his one girlfriend. But nothing really bad.
They all knew that ANY legal type trouble could take away their firearm rights for the rest of their lives.
Responsibility is both learned and taught. How much of each I have no idea but it takes both. And the earlier they learn independence the earlier they learn responsibility.
Thank you for your reply.
In 1968, when I was three, my mother once allowed me to run down the sidewalk alone, from our house to my grandmother’s house four doors down. This occurred in the Pleasant Grove neighborhood in east Dallas, Texas, at the time an idyllic, quiet, and prosperous working-class neighborhood. It was also an all-white neighborhood. By tacit agreement of the local landlords and property owners, Negroes were not allowed to build or buy there.
As we grew up, my cousins and I played outside all day, often in the front yard. We were lightly supervised by my mother or grandmother, who came to the screen door from time to time to check on us; otherwise, no adults were involved. There was no fence. There was no camera system.
The elementary school we attended — an ordinary Dallas public school — was scrupulously clean, well-ordered, and as quiet as any elementary school ever gets. We kids played on the playground without adult supervision. Other than the typical schoolyard scuffles, there was no violence. There was no drug dealing or gang activity. There was no security guard. There was no “school police”. There were also no black children. Dallas schools were not desegregated until 1972.
Today, as I approach my fiftieth birthday, the thought of a three year old white child being allowed to walk on that same sidewalk on that same street by himself is inconceivable. I myself would be most unwise to go for a walk on that street at any time of day. Our once-idyllic neighborhood is now a filthy ghetto, and it is almost all black. The school I attended is now a graffiti-splashed nightmare. The “school police” are regularly in attendance there. White children are not.
The world I knew as a child was destroyed by desegregation.
I’m not advocating a return to public, governmental segregation. There should be one drinking fountain at the courthouse for every taxpayer to use. But the right of free association — voluntary segregation on private property — must and will be restored. When property owners can once again legally covenant to keep any group they don’t like from buying into their neighborhoods, the schools problem and the neighborhoods problem and the racial problem will solve themselves. We will have white neighborhoods, black neighborhoods, Vietnamese and Korean and Russian neighborhoods, and our schools and streets will be at peace again.
Diversity is not our strength. Racial and cultural diversity = war. We must dump the dream of “vibrancy” and return to ethnic and racial segregation on private property. And if saying so makes me a racist, then drag me to the Race Court and put me on trial. I offer as evidence the city of Detroit… and Gary… and Baltimore… and Newark… and New Orleans… and Philly… and Atlanta… and Ferguson, Missouri — and Pleasant Grove, East Dallas.
I don’t care if it is fair. I don’t believe in “fair”. I believe in a world where a three-year-old white kid can run half a block down a sidewalk in safety.
Thanks for listening.
I grew up in New York. Though the neighborhood was mostly white, Jewish, Italian, and Irish, you couldn’t spend ten minutes on any street without seeing blacks as well. And as a kid under 12 I and my friends were allowed to go practically anywhere we wanted in Brooklyn, without supervision. We even took the subway into Manhattan alone at times. Our parents trusted us.
There were bad neighborhoods to avoid. And good neighborhoods where we had no fear. We quickly learned to tell the difference. Interestingly, it wasn’t skin color that helped you determine the difference. Skin color might matter, but any street kid quickly got an eye for other factors that were far more important.
However, that you continue to be obsessed about skin color (as you have been in previous comments), tells us more about you than it does about the decline in our society. Our society has declined, but it is not because blacks suddenly appeared here. They too have felt the disaster, even more than white society, and that disaster was brought upon them (and us) by foolish liberal policies that have damaged the social fabric in countless ways.
This is all done by design, the cabal used the tv & movies to scare the hell out of us. So we pro-
tected our dearest treasure, our kids more & more. But they were not safe at all, the Child Pro-
tective Services stole them right out of our own home & abused the hell out of them, like sex-
trade, organ trade, yes the elite needed sacrifices to Lucifer & that was their way of getting them.
People woke up to this, so now they promoted in South America to give up their young to be
raised in USA, but actually it is a kidnapping atrocity of same cabal, Aztec. Mayan rituals to the
Reptilians, who eat humans. We are not the top of the food chain.
I believe, every kid should have a dog to guard them when they play in the backyard.
Dear Mr. Zimmerman:
Thank you for your reply, and for allowing me to express my admittedly divisive opinion in your combox.
However, I don’t buy the “we’re all equal under the skin” argument any more. Nope, sorry, does not track with observed reality. I sympathize with your earnest desire to believe in racial equality, but we must all accept the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
But i’ll say no more on this topic for now. I’m only here to express a dissenting opinion, which I have done. I’m not here to convert anyone to my side. Reality is doing that job for me, with every passing day.
I appreciate your forbearance and your truly open-minded willingness to allow people with unpleasant opinions to speak in your forum. Such tolerance is rare in this “land of the free”.
The topic of desegregation reminds me of my college days. The housing that I lived in did a demographics study (largely to compare itself with the university population — possibly to demonstrate that it was not racially biased) and noticed that blacks and Hispanics were choosing to live in certain halls more than others — they were “self segregating.”
Management did not intend to do anything about it (people are free to choose, after all), but it was an interesting thing to note.
A few years later, in the mid or late 1980s, CBS’s “60 Minutes” did a story on “self segregation” on America’s college campuses. They showed groups of students talking to each other, and the groups that they showed were largely of similar races instead of distributed relatively according to the demographics of those schools.
It seems that when free to choose, people tend to gather based upon perceived similarities, such as race, sex (e.g. men in the living room, women in the kitchen), profession, etc.
Again, I don’t think that the colleges or the country should do anything about it, but it is interesting to note.