As the child of two intelligent, loving parents I’ve grown up thinking that the adults around us, particularly the parents, typically have the right answers.
That pristine picture in my mind is starting to get a little blotchy these days. Almost as if it’s got a rash. Like, say, from measles or something, to pick a random example.
I walk to work every day and there’s one part of my walk that gets me feeling a little anxious. It’s not the house with the odd combination of a “Beware Dobermans” sign posted to a very thin, rickety fence that seems to feature several Doberman-sized gaps.
It’s not the busy commuter street that has a crosswalk that every driver seems to mistake for the finish line at Talladega Superspeedway. It’s not the other obviously dog-crazy house on my route, a.k.a. The House at Pooh Corner.
The scary part of the walk is actually the elementary school I pass every day. It’s not the kids — I don’t think they start carrying weapons until junior high. No, it’s the parents and their automobiles. The drop-off zone at elementary schools is like Lord of the Flies except with fewer rules.
Every day I walk by the school during the morning rush and watch parents cram their giant pickup trucks and SUVs onto the one tiny street that’s already packed full of cars and buses where they then must furiously wait for eight minutes to get within 20 feet of the school so they can finally drop off their kid. They do this instead of simply stopping on one of the other streets surrounding the school and walking the extra 30 steps.
Earlier this week I watched a mother stop her car in the middle of the tiny street and then shout her kid out the door — right into oncoming traffic — as a line of cars formed down the block. As the line continued to grow behind her, eventually turning a corner to another busy street, the woman punctuated her performance by honking her horn. I can only guess that she was either trying to alert her child about a forgotten backpack or she had bonked the horn while reaching down to check on the hashbrowns in her dash-mounted deep fat fryer.
I walk by this scene every day and at least twice a week some parent nearly kills me, racing around the school. I’m just glad I’m a tall-ish adult human that the drivers eventually notice in the crosswalk. What about the rare kid who gets to walk to school? Maybe they should get guns.
Actually no, that doesn’t work either — a three-year-old in New Mexico shot both his father and pregnant mother last week after reaching into his mother’s purse looking for a phone and instead pulling out a loaded pistol. This comes after another incident last December in which an Idaho woman was killed in the middle of Wal-Mart when her two-year-old reached into her purse and grabbed a loaded handgun.
Say what you want about natural selection, but that poor kid now has to grow up knowing he killed his mom. In a Wal-Mart.
When you’re really young you think that parents have all the right answers. When some kids hit their teenage years they still think parents have all the right answers but they ignore them because they’re lame.
For me it took becoming a parent myself to fully realize that all the other parents in the world don’t have all the right answers. In fact, they’re just the same idiots you’ve grown up with, only now they have a little copy of themselves that they can play God with.
Which brings us back to measles. You know — the highly contagious disease that was a deadly killer before vaccinations virtually wiped it out, only now it’s making a comeback because a lot of parents are choosing not to vaccinate their children. You know — the disease that’s making a comeback because one doctor published one study that said vaccines might cause autism, and then that one study was debunked dozens and dozens of times and that one doctor, who has been stripped of his medical licence, was shown to be not just the author of a tainted study but, in fact, a fraudster who made large sums of money off his fraudulent study. Yes, those measles.
Cars, guns, video screens, high fructose corn syrup — there are so many manmade things that can harm our kids, why are we jeopardizing something that we happened to get right? I guess you can add viral Internet trash to the long list of manmade killers.
I have two young boys who are not yet old enough to have taken both of their measles vaccines. If either of them ended up getting a swollen brain because some parent decided not to vaccinate their child and then took them to the Magical World of Measlesland, well . . . I’m not really sure how to finish off this sentence without saying something horrible. So I guess I’ll say something nice. Parents, remember that all children are born believing that their parents have all the right answers. That’s such a wonderful concept. It’s also, of course, an impossible standard to live up to. But can’t we at least get the easy questions right?
Andy Prest can be reached via email at: [email protected]
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