CSotD: Rough stuff
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Okay, granted, "high" would be a bad idea. We all know "high" would be a bad idea.
But maybe if you set it on "low."
Baby Blues plays on a spectrum of issues with this simple gag, because there's substantial scholarship to indicate that kids benefit from their father's horseplay.
Not sure suspending the baby from a ceiling fan is a good idea. Certainly, not on "high." But the major issue would be the quality of the ceiling fan and its installation rather than whether the baby would enjoy an in-home, scaled-down version of the Scrambler.
Ideas born of comic exaggeration aside, however, we're still prisoners of a hide-bound mindset that says that, since too much rough play is bad, you should avoid any at all.
In fact, there's a whole emerging, suffocating mode of thought — in childrearing, yes, but much wider, in life itsownself — based on "If 'too much' is bad, then 'any' is simply a gateway to harm."
Some of this is an over-reverence for science that is as unscientific as the denier position. Today, we can measure such incredibly small amounts of anything that our ability to assess risk has become totally out of whack.
So, for instance, we're now obsessed with arsenic levels that occur naturally in the environment and better you should have beri-beri than eat unpolished rice and for godsake don't swallow that apple seed, and be sure to only drink pure, clean, filtered water but not if it comes in a bottle you environmentally insensitive ass.
And don't tickle the baby, or play any even moderately scary games, or pretend to fight, or let him walk because he might fall down.
There's also scholarship, by the way, indicating that boiling our children and everything they come in contact with may, in fact, be at least part of why the little darlings seem to be allergic to nearly everything.
Farm kids appear to have fewer allergies, and urban kids who grow up with pets are less likely to be allergic to them.
Being part of the earth seems to create immunities. Who knew?
IMHO, the real danger kids face is lack of parental empathy: The key is not to refuse to allow them to have any sort of adventure, which is one form of not getting it, but also to know your kids well enough — that is, not to project your own feelings onto them but actually to understand theirs — so that you can spot the unspoken messages they give off.
One of those non-verbal messages you should not ignore is "I'm really enjoying this, despite the screams."
The other is, "Okay, this is nervous laughter, not the real kind; I've had enough."
Maybe we need to give our kids a "safe word."
And plenty of opportunities to use it.
Speaking of nervous laughter
I've already offended all the people who disapprove of rough housing, so let's turn to the sports news. Kirk Walters combines a pair of lively issues in a cartoon that should make NFL Commissioner Roger "The Only Good Indian Is A Commercially Exploited Indian" Goodell use his safe word.
It's a nice meld of the question raised of why the NFL continues to suspend players for smoking grass with a recent lawsuit from former players about the over-prescription of pain killers to keep injured players on the field.
Jeremy Newberry has described players for the San Francisco 49ers lining up for shots prior to kickoff, including in one season in which he was never healthy enough to practice, but never missed a game. According to the lawsuit,
While playing in the NFL, Mr. Newberry received hundreds, if not thousands, of injections from doctors and pills from trainers, including but not limited to NSAIDs, Vicodin, Toradol, Ambien, Indocin, Celebrax, and Prednisone. No one from the NFL ever talked to him about the side effects of the medications he was being provided or cocktailing. He currently has Stage 3 renal failure and suffers from high blood pressure and violent headaches for which he cannot take any medications that might further deteriorate his already-weakened kidneys.
Meanwhile, the NFL is discussing whether maybe it should lessen the penalties for smoking a joint.
People who hate sports will get some satisfaction out of this, I suppose, but then they're the ones who have to watch "Swan Lake" without thinking about life-threatening eating disorders and permanently deformed feet.
And then there's this
I remember a Mad magazine feature in the '60s that compared the fall of Rome with the (potential) fall of the US, featuring, in both cases, helpless, fat, round-bottomed pop-up dolls being pushed around by "skinny barbarians from the East."
Lee Judge echoes not only that prediction, but this fairly recent study showing that inexpensive food is fueling America's obesity epidemic.
Food snobs will be delighted to hear that part of that decline in food prices — we spent 30 percent of our disposable income on food in the 30s, less than 10 percent today — comes from the subsidizing of corn syrup production, an I-told-you-so attitude that relies on the unscientific notion that the sugars in corn are somehow not as good for you as raw turbinado sugar, just as Morton's salt raises your blood pressure but that somehow pink Himalayan Salt is good for you.
(The pink color, by the way, comes from iron oxide. Which means you can get the same health benefits using cheap American salt if the water pipes in your house are sufficiently rusty.)
But the increased availability of fresh fruit and vegetables, and even our increase in exercise, doesn't offset the problem, which reaches across all class barriers.
The study mentions that our predilection for fast food is part of the problem, and not just the kind of fast food served at drive-thrus — which has been implicated in a more economic-based indictment of dietary problems — but the kind that you can toss in the microwave at home.
As restaurants once proclaimed in ads, "Fast food is not good. Good food is not fast."
I ate a mess of greens yesterday ("mess" is, I'm quite sure, the collective term for greens) that took about six hours to cook.
But it was a mix of collards and chard, and we know that only kale is truly good for you.
Ah well. I wasn't planning to live forever anyway.
You darned kids get out of my ears
Do those little punks even know about the earworm they're spreading?
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