Wednesday, May 22nd, 2013

Kids and Walking

Toronto, Ontario

Child safety is important to any community. We have all heard about child predators out there, there’s nothing more horrific. This may be one of the reasons for driving your kids to school, even if they live a block away.

What comes to my flippant mind on this topic is that while a community may respond to media hype on safety, there’s another evil that lurks in depriving kids of fresh air, exercise, interacting with neighbours and so on (God knows that even the school isn’t a safe haven – remember the massacre in Connecticut?). Recently some pundits have analyzed the situation of kids being driven to school. The Toronto Star ran an article outlining the backfiring nature of chauffeuring children. Surely, we don’t need more spoiled brats, sorry to say, and certainly we don’t need more traffic than necessary. The findings are that the generation is being robbed of nature. Are you surprised?

I reminisce about my one mile walk to and from school at SS 1 Harwich County along a quiet, windy road, and that occurred during the winter months as well. We had no school bus, and dad was at work with the car. To this day, I relish past thoughts of that special ‘down time’, and incidentally, when God was also on my mind.

I sometimes scratch my head at the schitzo society we live in. We say we don’t want any violence to come to our children, yet the gun happy culture found on the screen is rampant. We say we don’t want sex predators, yet we tolerate so much garbage from media and advertizing that make promiscuity main stream. I just don’t get it. I beg at the lotus feet of all readers to this blog to help me to understand the depth of hypocrisy that we live in. But in the meantime, I would say, let the children walk.

7 KM