Generation gap.

when i was a kid, my friends and i would run around our yards barefoot in the summertime throwing snap pops at one another because it was fun. it used to be that kids understood to play with their toys, not eat them. it used to be that the only safety measures kids really needed were a seatbelt and a few words from mom and dad.

we're now, apparently, regressing in our intellectual development. i saw tonite on the news that a group of researchers released a study showing that shopping carts are dangerous to children. amazingly, some 24,000 kids are injured throught the US annually in horrific, even tragic, shopping cart accidents. there have been similar warnings, usually around christmas, that the hottest toys of the year are dangerous to your child because there is potential that your kid could swallow a piece of said toy. amazingly, people were unaware prior to such reports.

i've watched, as many of you undoutedly have, as our society has been slowly (but not subtly) pussified over the last generation or two. shopping carts, escalators, and even toothpaste now have warning lables detailing the potential horrors of misuse. every thing, everywhere now comes with the message that you're potentially too stupid to use this item. i suppose it's not all that shocking, since we all witnessed some mental midget win millions of dollars in a lawsuit against mcdonalds for spilled coffee. regardless, it's sad that we're now so afraid of injury that even innocuous items like a set of bed sheets (pillowcase = suffocation) require detailed warnings about the numerous ways you can manage to hurt yourself.

further fueling the fear are the "reporters" bringing this "news" to us on a daily basis. it's disappointing enough to turn on the local newscast and see that a 5 year old boy was killed by his father in a police standoff (s. denver, 8/7/06) or that the people in the middle east can't quell the itch in their trigger finger with ointment. but to see such ridiculousness presented as news is, well, ridiculous. and while human interest stories are inevitably part of a newscast, a study finding that keds sneakers may have caused debilitating arthritic conditions in kids that may or may not have worn keds is not worthy of a place in the 30 minutes of airtime.

the debate about teaching evolution, intelligent design, or creation in our schools has been raging on for some time as well. but it's now a moot point, since it's obvious that evolution is the correct answer, as evidenced by the deevolution of human cognitive development. in fewer than 3 generations, we've morphed from visionaries and inventors who were making leaps and bounds in developments for all aspects of life to a bunch of mere imbeciles incapable of wiping our own asses without gashing the hole--and blaming the toilet paper manufacturer.

somewhere, charles darwin is both smiling and sobbing knowing he was right, but not foreseeing that his theory could work in reverse. of course, he'd have been here to experience all this if it weren't for that freak accident with the telegraph. if only it'd had a warning lable.