15 thoughts on “Everything that’s wrong with our world”

  1. Debbie, aged 16 years, able to walk the streets of Guelph AT NIGHT for hours on end alone or with girlfriend. Jenn at 16 years, only able to walk DURING THE DAY in areas and at times when there was high pedestrian, low-crime traffic (i.e she can walk to and from school with a group of friends). After dark, may travel by car and park in a well-lit, high-traffic, low-crime area or take a taxi (must report departure time from her cell). Jenn at 20 years and the foreseeable future (same rules).

  2. Yeah. Nautilus3 and big sister, aged seven and eight, were not so much allowed as required (but it was fine with us) to drive a one-horse cart four miles each way to school. We were responsible for unharnessing the horse (admittedly an elderly one) but the big boys helped us harness up after school. The harness was too heavy for us to lift. We were allowed to walk anywhere on the property – many square miles – just so long as we could see the smoke from the house. On a good day this meant several miles.

    The contemporary cocoon we put our children in appears to be necessary and maybe it is, but what is it doing to the development of their independence?

    “It’s a jungle out there” doesn’t seem to excuse the disservice we are doing them.

  4. I think you’re right starkg and it is a very effective way of presenting various issues including the one provided by Allegra. My husband’s work started using Google Earth for the work they are doing with the Canadian Embasies around the world, i.e. they can zoom in on any one embasy and take it from there, very cool!

    Nautilus3, I do believe you are right. Our children are missing out on experiences we took for granted. However, the alternative is unthinkable. The young lady who walked home from her job at Wendi’s was later found murdered (her body dumped on NCC property across the road from our local corner store). We used to let Jenn take the bus home from work as a hostess at a local Irish Pub on Richmond Road in Bell’s Corners. Very highly lit, high traffic, bus shelter — guys kept stopping to try to harrass her and some tried to pull her forcibly into their car. When I found this out, we told her to call us when she was done (from inside) and we would pick her up. If she took the car, we told her to have another staff member (male) escort her to her car. Our rules kind of evolved from incidents that occurred.

    Nautilus3, do you have any pictures, from that time period, i.e. taking a wagon and horse to school. Stuff like that really blows me away — to see that one generation before me this is what things were like.

  5. I don’t recollect seeing any. mOm tells me that among the elderly ranch women she talked to some years back, if you showed them a ranch picture, the first thing they would do is pick out the horses, name them, and then name the people. mOm also has fascinating diaries, excerpts from which would amuse, provoke, astonish and edify. PS starkg is the thoroughly wonderful Cousin Gerald.

  6. OK, I got that one wrong too. I thought starkg was Keith. Remember when I thought your Mom was a man and your Dad was one of your girlfriends. Hey, everybody, how ’bout we just use our real names!!

  7. Maybe your Mom should publish a book with all the material she is gathering. There is a lot of interest in this kind of thing. I recall a few things through my mother’s eyes and my own upbringing, but Jenn is completely removed from having seen any of it! I imagine this is fairly typical of people our age AND we will loose it if it doesn’t get documented. For those that don’t have their own family history documented, seeing that of others can still bring them some sense of where they came from, what our country used to be like.

  8. We live in a nanny society. Wrapping our kids in bubble wrap probably does save a few lives and injuries, but it also reduces independence and it reduces recognition of the fact that everyone must learn that if you do enough stupid things you are going to get whacked pretty good sooner or later. From the time i could walk i wandered anywhere i wanted. My mother has said that she never worried about me once.

  9. Debbie, I have put together about a dozen family history/story’tree books, and about 18 more are in process. Minor efforts, self-published, for the family. When they are about early Saskatchewan, the Saskatchewan Archives Board gets a copy. I write/edit them always with my grandchildren in mind. Those kids’ forebears were mostly rural, and the grandchildren – children too for that matter – are urban, so my efforts are riddled with footnotes. Example: in Allegra’s great-great-grandfather’s 1853 notebook, he observed, walking in and English village, that the villagers were cowbelling a woman. If you think THAT called for a footnote, you are right, and it took a certain amount of effort to explain.

  13. The Symetry of what? Allegra, thanks for asking, I wasn’t sure what cowbelling was either — I thought maybe the men would clang the cowbells for good-looking women. Either that or they clanged them for women they thought looked like cows.

  14. It seems that requiring a woman to wear a cowbell in an English village at that time was punishment for being a common scold. I can see that it would have an advantage over putting her in the stocks. She could carry on with her duties while being punished, and people would always know when she was coming.

  15. O m g so what you’re telling me is that when Christopher Walken asks for More Cowbell (it’s a famous SNL skit) he’s making a male supremacist in joke? The world is getting too too weird for me.

    A common scold? I beg to differ. I’m no ordinary scold. I am a world class scold!!!!

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