I feel sorry about kids today. They have it rough. There isn't much to get excited about. When they get old enough to get a driver's license, there is more fear than excitement. It's the traffic. Cars are so thick you can't stir them with a stick. Roads are multi-lane nightmares with SUV's, vans, and pickups stretching for miles, bumper to bumper. Sometimes they are stopped for hours and the rest of the time they are bumper to bumper at 80 miles per hour. No fun at all.

And then there is the fear of crazy people. Terrorists, kidnappers, desperate drug addicts, priests, CEO's, next door neighbors. You can't tell who you can trust. Good and bad often look alike. Parents don't let the kids out without supervision. It's not that they are strict. They know it's a jungle out there.

In my younger days, it was different. We lived in a small town in a nice neighborhood where people sat out on the porch in the summer and the
kids played all over everybody's yard and even in the street. Not much traffic then, and it wasn't going very fast. By the time I was ten, I was all over town by myself. It was about eight blocks from home to my father's store and I thought nothing of walking down there to bum a dime for the movies. I fished all up and down the Kentucky river that flowed through town. Groups of neighborhood kids hiked in the mountains. I often carried a BB gun all over town, and I never got arrested. At 12 (almost 13) I got a paper route and bought a bicycle. That was real freedom. I could wander miles from home. By the time I was 14, I was hitching rides to neighboring towns. There was nothing unusual about it. Everybody enjoyed freedom like that.

At 15, my friends and I were covering several counties on motorscooters. (We moved to Florida shortly after my 15th birthday.) We often spent time at the beach, or at a community recreation center. We fished from the bridges that connected the barrier islands with the mainland, or from the jetties alongside the shipping channel. A favorite place to ride scooters was a network of country roads that served cattle ranches, orange groves and Seminole Indian villages. Nobody ever got abducted or murdered or attacked by terrorists, and the worst accidents were skinned knees or jellyfish burns. I only remember one scooter wreck and that was when two boys were showing off. They zigzagged down a street and zigged into a telephone pole. Both recovered.

Kids today don't dream about a new fishing rod, a bicycle or a motor scooter. They don't get many chances to wander through the mountains or down a beach. Even if they get a driver's license, it has so many restrictions as to be almost worthless. They tend to withdraw into their electronic games and computers and televisions and boom boxes. They lead a sheltered life most of the time. Few have explored a cave, or camped out without a tent. Many have never seen the Milky Way, and some have never seen stars. Too many can't make a slingshot, or cook on an open fire. Some have never shot a bow or a rifle or flown a kite, or waded across the creek. They can't even take a pocket knife to school.

OK. Some of them have done some of these things, and there are still kids who have a horse and a .22. A few get to go waterskiing, but Dad is driving the boat. They get ty kwon do (or however you spell it.) classes and tennis lessons. And the lucky ones take trips that I couldn't even dream about when I was a kid. But overall, freedom is almost a thing of the past.
Howard