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It's the worst thing in the goddamn world, and what's worse? kids in this country are going to wind up put into rigid safety zones where they won't be trusted to walk through car washes, or anywhere at all for that matter, without being constantly overseen.
I don't know. When I was a kid, at age 13, my mom let me walk miles through the worst streets of Sheffield, and many blocks of some of the better streets of London, alone and sometimes carting an elite and expensive skateboard. And I was a foreigner!! She let me go to soccer matches with no-one but another 13-year-old, where we saw nothing less than full-out knife fights break out in the stands. At age 14 she let me walk about 30 blocks of Manhattan, alone, during nothing less than a fucking street festival on 42nd street circa 1978!
These were poor choices on the part of an otherwise over-protective mom. I was a cute and puny lad with no sense of how to deal with others and a rather complete trust of much of the world.
But it just goes to show you how far things have changed in terms of parental expectations in 30 years. Nowadays it would be assumed that I would be immediately snatched up and sold into slavery. Well not me now, I'm 40. Now I would probably have to pay to enter into such an arrangement.
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