The Nanny State

Mostly Cajun links to this article, which is about our paranoia and the way modern day America has become risk adverse. Which caused me to remember.

Back in the day, the late '60s, there were two places for a geek to hang out at the high school. The chemistry lab or the radio shack (not the company, the room on the second floor near old man Hutchinson's room.) We'd either be working with beakers and bunsen burners in the chem lab, dreaming up ways to torment the assistant principal (a load of sulfur dioxide was a guaranteed way to get suspended) or trying to listen to NASA talking to whichever mission was in orbit at the time. My junior and senior year was a time of actual learning, scientific exploration, and an exponential explosion of the understanding of our physical world.

We also had this little thing called The Draft. You either made the grades, or your senior trip was to Saigon. The Army recuiter would hang out in the parking lot, no doubt tipped off by the evil, scheming Assistant Principal. If you dropped out, or were expelled, the recruiter was waiting in the parking lot when you came out. Either sign up, or in two weeks you get a draft notice. Helluva choice. I digress.

In my high school, scientific exploration was expected. You had to pass science and you couldn't do it just sitting in the classroom. Lab work was part of the deal. Biology, chemistry, physics was just part of high school. You either passed or took THE WALK out to the parking lot alone. Once or twice a year, someone screwed up in the lab and destroyed something. It was almost never fatal, but was looked upon as part of the learning process. Bubbling pure hydrogen into a soap solution made a nice mini-explosion if you were too close to a burner. We all learned not to do that.

Across the building, in the radio shack, high voltage was the order of the day. Charge a capacitor and toss it to a fellow student, then laugh like hell when he danced. Good clean fun.

Fast forward to September 1999. Summer is over and my youngest is back in high school. He faces the dreaded "What did you do this summer?" essay. We had been clearing pasture and I taught him how to make pipe bombs. Blowing a stump is a lot easier than digging it out, and you have to be careful not to explode yourself. Some PVC pipe, some black powder, some cannon fuse. Too little and the stump just sits there. Too much and pieces fall out of the sky forever. Smokeless powder versus black. Tamped or untamped. Differing soil conditions. Very scientific. Very noisy. Lots of running involved. Good athletic workout, sprinting away from a burning fuse.

He wrote the essay. I got a call from the school. In the middle of the workday, in a plainclothes assignment at the time and some of the teachers didn't know I was a cop. They were babbling something about Columbine High School and pipe bombs and firearms. ("What is that on your hip?"). It was all very instructive and representative of the way we have become overly concerned about risk.

We have become a nation of pussies.