Jonathan Schwarz: "There really are no words."

I have a wealthy and conservative great aunt with an AOL address.

Until I got pruned from her CC: list, I got an occasional mass mailing from her. Sometimes a pretty decent joke, most often a bit of "glurge," occasionally a piece of odious crap.

Like:

A Swift Vote Veterans mailing.

Or the still-circulating "Obama went to a radical Muslim madrassa when living in Africa."

In both of the cases above, I responded to everyone on the list and cited the relevant Snopes article.

Too hell with being nice and quiet and polite.

The first step in getting people to commit atrocities is to get them to believe absurdities. Preferably laced with heavy doses of fear.

Become a Fox attacker.

Fox Attacks. They Distort, We Reply

I watched some Fox News at my mother's in early October 2001 (during the famous anthrax scare). Even I felt myself getting more agitated about the situation, because of my constant exposure to it. I can understand why my mother is my most reactionary relative, because this is all she watches for news.

I just got back from a visit to my 84-year-old father. Happily, we see eye-to-eye on politics. He was a union organizer when he was younger, and just seems to get more liberal as he gets older. In the recent democratic debate, he was cheering on Kucinich.

The sad thing is that he is so depressed by what is happening to this country. "I didn't think," he says, "that after fighting in World War II as a young man, that at the end of my life I would see my country turning to fascism." I wish I could say something to cheer him up, but I can't.

At one point in my life, about twelve years ago, my strategy of constant questioning, nagging, ranting and raving paid off a little bit with my parents. They started, bit by bit over the next six years or so, to open their minds.

Right about the time they moved to South Carolina, though, they started watching FOX News. We were visiting during the elections and had to debate for hours, and dig up evidence on the intar-webs (with fer chrissakes dial-up) to demonstrate to my Dad that the swift-boat s**t was just that. I had to have long, long talks with my mother about how countering verifiable fact with outright lies was not "telling both sides of the story." I still don't think I've convinced them. We've lost ground, now.

It is heartbreaking. I keep telling them, "That's me. I'm that raging leftist. It's me. I'm pro-choice. I'm anti-torture. I believe the administration is gutting the Constitution systematically and thoroughly for its own ends."

The constant propaganda is exhausting to keep up with. But it's necessary, and it's necessary to do it outside of our audience of the converted, too. If I just do it on my blog, and everyone there already agrees with me, and then I do it here...well, I guess I'll sign off and go call my mom, now.

I went to the google aerial views of BO's spread and if I'm not mistaken I think I can make out a whole flock of loofas just offshore. Who'd a thunk it?

Leslie, my 80-year-old mother feels much the same way, and platitudes like "America will recover, it always has" just don't cut it. Particularly when the speaker has doubts about how much it will recover and how long it'll take to do so.

I have a lot of family members who are arch-"conservatives" in the Brent Bozell says it, it must be true sense. They more or less always have been, though, which is why I guess this sort of thing doesn't really come as much of a shock to me. I was pretty much the spawn of Satan going in.

Speaking of millionaire perverts, let's not forget Rush Limbaugh, caught coming back from sex-tourist heaven with a pocketful of Viagra prescribed to someone else.

What was fascinating was the talking head on Fox who said that a blog is 'one-way communication'. I have not posted this comment, apparently.

I used to say that I didn't watch TV, but basically thought TV was okay if not of much interest to me personally; but the past few years, I've been less and less sure about the TV is okay part. More and more, it seems that friends and family--even liberal friends and family--who spend a lot of time watching TV see a very different world around them than those of us that don't: one that's filled with danger at every step, with people out there just waiting to snatch their children and shoot on sight and attack without warning; and, most of all, the sense that the world is not only perilous, but more perilous than ever before.

I think that television's narration of our world really has interfered deeply with perceptions of that actual world. It's troubling. And more and more, it's a disconnect I'm not sure how to bridge, as a non-TV-watcher. More and more often, not watching television is like living in a different culture.

My parents were and are in Leslie and Linkmeister's situation. I'd have liked Dad to pass away in a year when the country was on the mend, not in further decline. I'd like Mom to get some months or years in a country on the mend, too. I get alternately furious and despairing as I watch the major candidates on the Democratic side keep squeezing more and more to the right, apparently looking to see how little change they can get away with calling on the issues that matter most to the health of the republic. I have this ghastly feeling that a Democratic victory in 2008 might add up to no more than "the same old militarism and tyranny except with more administrative competency".

Fragano @ 12

All of theirs are one way, therefore all blogs are one-way. Even when they're holding Kos responsible for all the comments that (their?) trolls post on his site, they still say that. Logic is not their forte.

I have relatives scattered across the political spectrum, from Green to Fox-News-believing. Mostly I avoid politics; I will say, though, that my Most-Senior-Aunt is not a Fox-News-believer, and she turns 93 next Saturday (and lives in Texas).

When I was a consultant I travelled all over heck and gone. Every public place I went to blared Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, and the like. Hotel lobbies, airports, restaurants, bars. It was awful. It reminded me of a Clockwork Orange, or 1984. You couldn't get away from the propaganda to save your life.

I finally bought myself a TV-B-Gone universal remote. Blissful silence followed in my wake. I love my TV-B-Gone.

Bruce @ #14 writes: I have this ghastly feeling that a Democratic victory in 2008 might add up to no more than "the same old militarism and tyranny except with more administrative competency".

Yes, that's one of my concerns too; that all the nibbling and chomping away at civil liberties we've seen over the past six years since 9/11 will be quietly adhered to even if there's a Democratic President with a Democratically-controlled Congress.

As you say, government will be more competently run, in which case we won't really know that few of those transgressions were reversed or repealed.

Janni @13, I have the same experience with my family. My mother's convinced that there's a nationwide epidemic of child abduction, even though she has no factual basis for such a belief. I can quote FBI statistics showing that child abductions have decreased over the past couple of decades, and that teens are in more danger than young children, and she just refuses to believe it, like a young-earth creationist confronted with the fossil record.

Janni, it really depends on what you watch. I have, for instance, at least one thoroughly conservative friend who watches quite a lot of TV...almost exclusively the Discovery, Food, and Home & Garden channels, and who's a real asset to his family, friends, and communities. He cooks meals for those in need, helps out with emergency relief of different kinds, and so on, and applies a lot of the practical stuff he's seen on TV to make his work more productive and enjoyable. Most of us thinking about the impact of TV can easily overlook that kind of practical viewing (in his case, leavened with the History Channel to launch him into new reading bouts about subjects that interest him), but it's also a part of the landscape, and by the ratings, one worth considering.

Sort of makes me glad that my mom justs watches the televangelists on Sunday and Food Network or HGTV the rest of the time (with an occasional foray into Weather Channel...). She tolerates Jim watching sport when we're over and she may watch the baseball games for all I know.

Says the news makes her anxous. Hell, it makes ME anxious....

The concept of a television performer whining that blogs are too "one-way communication" just burned out my irony meter.

Laura, #16: If the TV in a public place is showing Faux News, and I can reach it, I'll change the channel to CNN. Still bad, but at least not odious.

I am convinced that the primary mission of Faux News, at least since 9/11, has been to push as many Americans as possible into PTSD and keep them there. I saw people I knew do it to themselves, obsessivly watching those planes flying into the Twin Towers over and over again; that was the seed. All that had to be done after that was to keep trotting out more threats and disasters -- even if they had to be made up out of whole cloth. Anything to keep the audience drinking the Kool-Aid, because a mind that's already been blurred by a toxic information dump is easier to dupe in other ways.

Small rays of hope, though. Over the past few years, as my partner and I travel to various cons, we've noticed that (1) more TVs are tuned to CNN or MSNBC instead of Faux, and (2) truckstops that used to play a steady diet of "America uber alles" country-western music are now featuring "golden oldies" pop stations on their Muzak. When the truckers are getting sick of it...

Avram (#18) My mother's convinced that there's a nationwide epidemic of child abduction, even though she has no factual basis for such a belief.

This is something I've been thinking about how to counter - the fact that kids don't get the same kind of freedom to explore now as they did a generation ago, despite the risks being unchanged or lowered. I kind of think of it as an 'expected value' problem; the likelihood of something horrible happening to your child is extremely low, but the 'cost' of it happening is extremely high, and therefore a (nominally) rational response is to limit your children's unsupervised time.

What I'd be interested in adding to this argument is some information about the benefits of allowing children this kind of freedom. Anecdotally, I think that it results in self-sufficiency and resourcefulness, but I don't know if there is anything to back it up. But I'd really like to see those ideas become a staple of the national consciousness in the same way as 'missing children' newsflashes are.

(And then there's the point that, say, we are happy to gloss over how incredibly unsafe driving is. It's statistically much safer to walk to school than it is to be driven to school; the most likely place and way a child is to be injured is being hit by another student's vehicle in the drop-off area.)

Leslie @6: I think your story might be, if possible, even sadder than Perlstein's original anecdote.

My two surviving grandparents are nearly in their nineties, and their health is declining; after all their generation's sacrifices and hard work, it would be nice to think that maybe they would have the opportunity to see us building on the foundation they helped to establish rather than tearing down our democracy and putting up a new gilded monument to fascism.

Thanks, Jim, for providing links to concrete things we can do to help stem the tide of disinformation.

All television isn't created equal. There's PBS, BBC America, The Science Channel, The History Channel and a multitude of others like them. I admit to more than a passing weakness for police procedurals and other mysteries whether network or cable. The USA network gives me Monk, The 4400 and The Dead Zone. I despise the SciFi channel for showing wrestling but love Eureka, The Dresden Files, Stargate and Battlestar Galactica.

The problem with those who watch Fox is that they have been convinced that an all-dark fantasy network is running real news.

My 87 year old mother wanted to live long enough to see George Bush leave office in disgrace (hissing, booing, thrown shoes,etc.) Unfortunately, she did not. I picture her in Some Better Place, cheering on the Democrats -- who may not deserve her cheers -- and brandishing a ghostly shoe.

Fox News -- ugh. Stomach-turning. I'm gonna git me one of those dingusses that turn off any TV in reach, and any time I find one turned to Fox -- zap! The frightening thing about Fox is that so many people seem to believe that what Fox shows and tells them is news, and that what the other networks present is and must be lies, because it disagrees with The World According To Fox.

The idea of the promotion of fear through the media was one of the major messages I got from Bowling for Columbine. It certainly applies here in Oz too.

I'm also similarly depressed by the rolling back of so many of the advances we've made here in the last 150 years, including things I've supported and worked for in my own lifetime (see commentary at Webdiary). Now I'm a lot weaker, sicker & have a whole lot of extra worries on my plate, so can't get as much involved in resisting and arguing against the decline — which of course leaves me even more worried and stressed. Bleah: vicious circle time. IntarTubes are useful in some ways, however.

There's a great bit in V for Vendetta in which the future England's fascist masters, feeling threatened, turn on a propaganda blitz to convince the increasingly restive populace that "they need us!" The scare stories look a hell of a lot like Fox News.

Later, ba Thl Snjxrf qnl, jura "I" vaivgrf gur choyvp gb wbva uvz va gur fgerrgf, gurer'f n ybiryl fprar jurer Wbua Uheg'f fpnel nhgubevgnevna punapryybe enagf ba GI, guerngravat qver chavfuzrag sbe nalbar jub wbvaf gur cebgrfg. Naq nyy bs gur cynprf jurer jr'ir frra crbcyr jngpuvat GI guebhtu gur zbivr -- chof, yvivat ebbzf, byq ntr ubzrf -- ner rzcgl.

How I'd love to see something like that.

"If you want a better world, start thinking about how to make this stuff stop."

Only idiots or media analysts without a gag reflex habitually watch O'Reilly.

Therefore, the only solutions I can see are:

1. Kill O'Reilly.

2. Kill the idiots.

Since neither will happen, we're stuck with O'Reilly.

Bruce Baugh, #14: "I have this ghastly feeling that a Democratic victory in 2008 might add up to no more than "the same old militarism and tyranny except with more administrative competency."

Me too. Then the following words appear before me in letters of fire: SUPREME COURT.

Laura Mixon, #16: You actually have a TV-B-Gone? I've always wanted one! Bring it to VP so we can all see!

Lee, #22: "I am convinced that the primary mission of Faux News, at least since 9/11, has been to push as many Americans as possible into PTSD and keep them there. I saw people I knew do it to themselves, obsessively watching those planes flying into the Twin Towers over and over again; that was the seed." Yes, exactly.

Debcha, #23: "This is something I've been thinking about how to counter - the fact that kids don't get the same kind of freedom to explore now as they did a generation ago, despite the risks being unchanged or lowered." Don't get me started. I continue to think that one of the luckiest things about my life is that my adolescence took place in the early 1970s, peak era of benign neglect. What kids today have to put up with--even from parents who are liberal-minded sensible friends of mine--looks to me like jail.

Bruce: a point. I should perhaps say "mainstream television," though defining that is tricky. It goes beyond just Fox -- local network news and CNN do their share of promoting fear (and also cheap and facile sentiment, a whole other rant), as does much of non-news entertainment -- but not as far as, say, the Food Network or Discovery Channel.

Debcha: I was just in Iceland, where independence is hugely valued and the default assumption is that, in such a small country, the children are safe, and where children do still get to run around and play on their own. They certainly seem less stressed for it--I wouldn't say I never saw children melting down, or parents losing it as a result of same, but it seemed far less common than in the U.S. And one has the sense that children are not simply protected, but respected, which is a huge thing, one I find myself rather jealous of.

Ironically, even though children are less thoroughly supervised there, they also seem more a part of the larger society, present not only in special isolated "family friendly" places. Because the whole society is more or less friendly family, which somehow translates into not being child-obsessed, but comfortable for adults and children alike.

Patrick, I'm so with you. They have transfomed the :Leawood Park ( roads, a caboose donated from who knows where and just open space for bicycling) to a soccer park/pool complex/etc. formal used area that I really doubt any teens use as a "I need to regroup, think things out and just have space to do that" kind of thing.

I despair in more ways than this.

#29:

Therefore, the only solutions I can see are:

1. Kill O'Reilly.

2. Kill the idiots.

This is how democracy gets lost. We've got to stop them, or there just won't be much left: One of these days David Petraeus will look more closely at the light at the end of the tunnel... and realize it's an onrushing freight train surging up at him from behind (pictured). Hasn't happened yet, but it's only a matter of time. But by the time the train runs over Petraeus, he will have served his purpose. Bush will have successfully passed on the forever war to a Democratic president. Unless. We. Stop. Him.

I used to think that my father was an arch-conservative. Then I noticed that he was seeming more and more (socially, at least -- fiscally his views never budged) liberal by the year. The day he rolled down the window and screamed "GET A JOB!!" to the anti-abortion wingnut protester on the street corner, my brain just about imploded.

He never changed ... the world did. And thank god he never watched Faux News (though CNN was always a mainstay in the house, that's about as good as I could hope for). He never had much use for Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly. He went to his grave a staunch Republican, but I don't think he was too happy with the state of the Union at the end.

And now that he's gone, my mom's true political views are finally getting some airtime. I'm pleased to learn that she's a lot more in agreement with me. But dammit, she still watches CNN.

#29: It's not safe to make statements like that online when you've taken no precautions at all to maintain your anonymity. You'll be joining the rest of us in the FEMA Happy Camps soon enough, I suppose.

In both of the cases above, I responded to everyone on the list and cited the relevant Snopes article.

Stefan @2, I did that a couple of times with mass emails my mother-in-law sent out. In one case, it was a group of pictures with the Ten Commandments, a Cross, a praying child, the American flag, and the Declaration of Independence, and some text about how important these things were to America and urging Good Christians to speak out to keep prayer in the public schools. I replied to all pointing out that she had left out the Constitution, without which we wouldn't even be a country, which is so important that all federal public officials, employees, and military personnel take an oath to protect, uphold and defend it. I also pointed out that the First Amendment to that important document prohibited the very sort of public establishment of religion she was urging.

She dropped me from the mailing list.

In December she sent around an email urging Christians to soldier on in the "war on Christmas," with a picture of a Christmas tree and a caption which read something like "This is no 'Holiday Tree'!" My husband got this email, I didn't. He replied to all saying that, well, actually it was a Holiday Tree, since the Christian use of evergreens had been appropriated from pagans, and that there are not really conifers to speak of in Palestine.

He has since also been dropped from the list.

I can't imagine why.

Janni, I'd be quite content to say that news coverage in general is part of the regimen of fear, a crucial part of the conservative movement's flavor of the Spectacle. Fox does it most intensively, but all the news channels have it as a part of the mix, often a large one.

Patrick: Yes, there very definitely is the Supreme Court, and I am sure that depression is a big factor in my imagining a Democratic president and congress rolling over to accommodate Republican demands on the selection of candidates, ending up with a semi-stealthed addition to the Republican toady lineup. What scares me apart from depression making its own fears is how un-broken the Republican machine still is, and how ineffectual the Democratic response.

Sara Robinson, over at Orcinus, with some thoughts on how to stop the elderly getting brainwashed by Fox.

debcha @ #23, the cover story in the August 6 edition of Time magazine inadvertently addresses one of your questions about kids and freedom. It's entitled The Myth About Boys, but it's as much about children in general as it is boys in particular, and it's a slap at interpreting social trends based on outdated statistics.

Anyway, it looks at a Fed report entitled "America's Children: Key National Indicators of Well-Being, 2007" (no link in the story) and discovers that all those horrific numbers of child abductions, youth crime, and teen pregnancy are falling. We wouldn't know it from our local television stations or the national cable networks, though.

Living in the USA sounds pretty hellish, with this heavy propaganda. It's really hard to avoid Orwell references.

My father, also of the WW2 generation, has been saying for years that out politicians are trying to be Hitler. But remember that there is a British English usage--"little Hitler" for the sort of small scale, rule-lawyering, bureaucratic, thug who one might find in the TSA--which seems to open the label up to totalitarianism in general.

And if we're talking about subverting the system, Tony Blair seems to have done the more competent job: he did it by changine the law, rather than ignoring it.

re: Childhood freedom or lack thereof. The repressive lock-down and monitoring that modern children live with is one of my unwritten essays/rants. People complain about their kids being dependent, but the poor buggers have never had a chance to develop independence.

My father loathes Bill Clinton (I'm not especially impressed, myself). When I saw him last, about a year ago, he was worried about Hilary's run for President. I looked at him and said "You seriously think that she would do more harm to the constitution, habeus corpus, states rights, civil liberties, and personal freedom than the current administration? Do you really want to vote for someone that will endorse the decisions that have been made for the last six years? A strict constitutional interpreter and civil libertarian such as yourself has trouble with Hilary Clinton being President but not George W. Bush?" He looked at me for about 15 seconds, and replied "You have a pretty good point."

It's one of the few times in my life I've derailed my father on a rant, and one of the only reasons I can remember the details.

I think I got my inocculation against the Murdoch Media early. My parents used to get the (Murdoch-controlled) Western Australian Sunday Times newspaper when I was growing up. It wasn't much at the best of times, but over the years, it was getting more and more trashy. About the only thing worth reading in it were the comics. Eventually we cancelled our subscription to that newspaper, simply because it wasn't worth the money we were paying for it.

When I moved east (to the ACT), nine years ago, I was in hardcore Murdoch media territory. The Packer and Murdoch families control the media with an iron grip, and finding alternative viewpoints from theirs is always tricky. I started relying on the internet for news - but even so, I could pick the Murdoch papers by sight on the newsstand. Same trashy content, same exaggerations and distortions of viewpoints.

Rupert Murdoch's global news empire relies on the tricks of trivialising the downsides of unrestrained anything-goes capitalist exploitation, exaggerating even the slightest risk of anything which smacks even vaguely of socialism, and distorting the statistical likelihood of harm to their readers to suit those perspectives. They'll use "sex sells" as a justification for blatant exploitation, and will attempt to use "the public right to know" as an excuse for the most outrageous chequebook journalism. As an institution, Rupert Murdoch's global media empire is scum. I'm not sure whether to pity or scorn the journalists who work there - pity, I think, for the newer ones, and the crusaders. Scorn for the cynics and the ones who are only in it for the money.

Fox News appears to merely be a shining example of the breed.

Speaking as a parent, I hate having to raise my kids in captivity.

But they are fed a steady diet of fear, terror and anxiety. The nursery my daughter goes to talked to her about Madeleine McCann, and it took me days undo that. And I had to withdraw my son from his primary school's "keeping myself safe" unit after seeing the scaremongering materials they sent home.

But if they were to go out alone, whom would they play with? All their friends, all their contemporaries, are under the same watchful eye as mine are supposed to be.

The result? the media harrangues parents about restraining their kids too much.

This is one of the reasons we're moving to the Netherlands, where the tendency to raise kids like veal is less universal. It's not a solution, though, just sweeping back the tide.

So, abi, the fear-mongers reap abundant harvests even in Europe? It's not just a USA thing?

As for myself, I stay away from TV news (now there's an oxymoron) for the same reason that I stay away from conservative columnists. If I can't respond back, all I wind up with is high blood pressure. I also ignore trolls on ML because, while I technically can respond, they aren't listening, or they listen but Reason and Logic don't really apply in their worldview so ther's no point in responding, and I really like keeping my blood pressure low.

I'd rather watch a SciFi Channel movie about giant bugs.

(cont'd from #45)

Abi... I do remember your encounters with what schools were teaching to kids (for example, don't trust any stranger even if you're lost), but I was wondering if politically motivated fear-mongering oozed out of the European 'adult' news outlets as much as it does out of the American ones.

I'll just note it's nice that ML is a happening place any hour of the clock, even for those of us with internal clocks set to a time-zone somewhat west of Hawaii (yet east of the date line).

Serge @45,
The only TV news I watch now is The Daily Show, because by making me laugh they keep me from weeping.

Serge #46 - We get quite a bit of fear-mongering in the UK, but for me (and a lot of other people) we mostly have the feeling we've been here before. Jihadist terrorists aren't actually any more frightening than the IRA*. On the other hand, the IRA were white, english-speaking christians**; the fear-mongering in tabloids suggests that Islamic terrorists are scary because they are different, foreign and thus incomprehensible; an indescribable horror from beyond our understanding. That's my reading anyway.

* Who rattled the windows of my flat in Earls Court in 1996 when they abandoned a bomb a quarter of a mile away in an attack that went wrong in some way. None of us even thought about changing our behaviour or leaving the city, but then we were 20 years old and believed we were immortal.
** Or that's how they were characterised.

#13 ::: Janni

"More and more often, not watching television is like living in a different culture."

I agree. We've not had a TV for five or six years. We get my news from radio, the internet, and newspapers. We've never watched an episode of Big Brother, or Changing Homes (or whatever the latest "this is how to redecorate your houe and sell it for lots of money" programme is). The only "soap" I follow is The Archers (Radio 4) and even that I only listen to occasionally. We don't get to see endless repeats of speculations on Maddie's abduction/latest bombings/shootings/atrocities/violence (delete as applicable) in Iraq/Afghanistan/UK big city/Darfur/Elsewhere (delete as applicable).

Sometimes it's like we live in a different world from most people around us.

Regarding the UK, as stated by Neil Willcox @ 48, we've lived with the IRA for decades. That's one of the reasons I and my husband get frustrated and annoyed about the attacks on our civil liberties, perpetrated by our government, under the excuse of "War against Terror": attacks involving random bystanders being blown up are nothing new to these shores. Why the disproportionate response this time?

As for children and the risks to them, I have no doubt that the percieved risks are higher than the actual risks, when everyone all over the country (or even further abroad) gets to hear about every fatal accident while on an adventure holiday, every abduction. It used to be, these events were known about in the local community only. Now they're all being brought to you in glorious technicolour, with coverage saying how tragic each event is and how we must do everything possible to prevent it.

Additionally, other risks of childhood, particularly childhood diseases, have decreased, due to extensive vaccination campaigns. Therefore the proportion of deaths due to misadventure have no doubt [I've not researched this, so I can't give statistics and references, but it's logical] increased.

Yes, the "keep your children under lock and key at all times" attitude is alive and well in my area too. If the kids aren't being watched by the parents when they're outside, they are being enrolled in nonstop camps and classes so they have no free time at all.

For their own good, you know; it's a lot more dangerous for them now than it was when we were growing up.

Part of it is that more and more children are growing up in subdivisions than in rural areas, where there's a lot of open space to run around in. I grew up on a 45 acre farm with similar farms surrounding us; I explored a square mile of territory as a child and all my parents knew was I was somewhere in it. Now there may be 10,000 people in that square mile of land for most kids.

I recently saw the graphic on how the range children are allowed to wander has diminished. Something like up to 5 miles away in the 40s, one mile away in the 70s, and about a block now.

Elsewhere, I've seen it remarked that kids don't go outside and mess around in the woods now. And all these are thanks to the perception that the pervert army is just waiting for your child to get more than 50 yards from your armed compound.

I remember seeing literature for kids in the 60s that warned about "the friendly stranger," and H. Allen Smith told a story of someone in the 20s who could have been an opera singer but stayed away from the city for fear of "the needle men," but the insanity seems to be reaching a point now where going outside will be considered suicidal (and with no more evidence than how often the tabloids resort to reporting it, rather than any actual frequency of incidents). And I look at my daughter, now five, and I want her to have the confidence to go places, see things, and do stuff.

When she's older, of course.

It's hard for me to compare today with 45 years ago, but I used to walk all the way around my block (a nice rectangular city block with an alley through the middle), and before I was six, I made it all the way to the West Side Market to buy a forbidden box of Cracker Jacks with money I heisted from my own piggy bank. When we moved out of town, I ranged as far as a mile in any direction without much planning. I want Sarah to be able to do the same kind of thing, I think.

Kathryn from Sunnyvale @ 47... I enjoy Jon Stewart's show, and Colbert's, but I don't understand their choice of guests. Henry Kissinger?

Yes, the "keep your children under lock and key at all times" attitude is alive and well in my area too. If the kids aren't being watched by the parents when they're outside, they are being enrolled in nonstop camps and classes so they have no free time at all.

This drives me crazy. Puppy (who is now almost 13!) goes to hockey for a few hours in the morning 3 days a week. We deliberately did NOT schedule him for anything else, so he could run around the neighborhood and be a hooligan. Nearly all of his "park posse," though, are scheduled to the max with one thing or another...and the expressions on the parents' faces when I said I wasn't getting a nanny for after school or summer (this is my first summer of single working mom), well, it's clear they are just this side of calling child control on me. :)

Puppy, of course, is perfectly safe, has a good head on his shoulders chock full of too smart for his own good and common sense. I expect he is capable of getting himself out of whatever trouble his not-as-nefarious-as-he-thinks schemes get him into. I'm not worried about abduction and such. I worry more about him thinking up some fabulous way to blow up the garage...

Neil Willcox @ 48... We get quite a bit of fear-mongering in the UK

Didn't Rupert Murdoch start his media empire in the UK? In that case, I shouldn't have been surprised to find that the fear-mongering goes on there too.

Abi @44, do you currently like in the UK? My (vague) impression is that the UK suffers even more than the US from paranoia about child abuse and abduction.

PNH @30: Then the following words appear before me in letters of fire: SUPREME COURT.

A couple of days ago, I saw in a news story that Chuck Schumer was talking about blocking any further Bush Supreme Court nominations. Yeah, I thought, good timing, Chuck. That's not exactly likely to matter in the next year and a half. Then last night I saw that Justice Roberts had an idiopathic seizure. No lasting harm, they say, but a pretty startling coincidence.

Avram @55
Abi @44, do you currently like in the UK?

Yes, for (checks watch) about 30 more hours. Then the Netherlands.

My (vague) impression is that the UK suffers even more than the US from paranoia about child abuse and abduction.

From what I've seen, it's about neck and neck. A lost child can get the whole nation going, but on the other hand parents still leave prams with babies in them outside of small shops, or kids in cars (in appropriate weather).

My experience is that the Anglophone countries spend a lot of time reacting to, or going along with, American media and American mores on these things.

My impression is that non-Anglophone Europe is looser about these things. From what I hear, the Netherlands certainly is.

Things like this remind me that I am lucky enough that my friends and family are all, with the exception of one genuine Texas plutocrat of the self-professed libertarian genus, the church-going sort of New England liberals that punk-rockin' blogtastic progressives hate slightly more than they hate Bill O'Reilly. The words "bourgeois" and "heteronormative" wouldn't be inapposite.

I don't except myself; I can never summon much enthusiasm for the "these are the buildings we have to burn; these are people we have to kill" part of the conversation. In fact, I wonder whether these circumstances have robbed me of the converting passion that one needs to be able to make an impression on devoted Fox News watchers. I certainly don't think I've made much headway just asking people what it is that makes them think Jesus wants to watch us kill each other.

Since the IRA have been mentioned...

Operation Banner, the British Army's emergency deployment to keep the peace in Northern Ireland ends at midnight tonight. (well, it probably ends at 23:59 today or 00:01 tomorror, but they don't want to cinfuse the journalists).

A guy I used to know was one of those soldiers in the first deployment. They were sent out to protect the Catholics from the Protestant mobs. The Protestant-dominated government of Northern Ireland were treating Catholics in the way that some parts of the USA treated blacks.

The existing government infrastructure never collapsed in Northern Ireland. And, eventually, it stopped being about bullets and became a question of politics. But, for 38 years, the British Army was there, holding the line.

Since the IRA have been mentioned...

Operation Banner, the British Army's emergency deployment to keep the peace in Northern Ireland ends at midnight tonight. (well, it probably ends at 23:59 today or 00:01 tomorror, but they don't want to cinfuse the journalists).

A guy I used to know was one of those soldiers in the first deployment. They were sent out to protect the Catholics from the Protestant mobs. The Protestant-dominated government of Northern Ireland were treating Catholics in the way that some parts of the USA treated blacks.

The existing government infrastructure never collapsed in Northern Ireland. And, eventually, it stopped being about bullets and became a question of politics. But, for 38 years, the British Army was there, holding the line.

#51 Kip W: My recollection is that the graphic on kids' wandering ranges accompanied an article about the UK, so it isn't just the USA that has this problem.

To some extent, what we're seeing here is the tabloidization of the media. Look at CNN, which is increasingly dominated by things like "Nancy Grace," which is entirely about fear. I remember a decade or two ago when the local TV news began to be about nothing but fires, accidents, murders, and other fear stories. Now the national news (not just Fox, not just CNN) is more and more about "tabloid" subjects. The same is true of the weekly "news" magazines. Newsweek has become a week of health, a week of religion, a week of celebrity, and sometimes a week of politics.

Even the cable channels that are sometimes educational or interesting are often about fear: think of The Discovery Channel, currently doing "Shark Week," which is large about shark attacks...

Most political blogs are about fear; left or right, it makes little difference. A lot of posts and comments here on ML are about fear, too.

Fear sells newspapers, ads, pageviews. "If it bleeds it leads." Alas.

It's not only TV that scares parents into keeping their kids on a short leash at all times. What is one to think of the news that Myspace just weeded out 29,000 sex offenders? 29,000??? I have to admit, if I had kids, I'd be getting nervous about letting them online unsupervised, never mind letting them out to wander in the woods or the streets. Sure, an inner voice would be telling me I'm overreacting, but would I have the sense to listen to that voice?

Lee @22: I was one of those folks who should have turned the TV off on 9/11. After a couple of months where my partner knew I had a problem* (but I hadn't realized it) I started taking a meditation class at the local Buddhist center.

That snapped me out of the haze of depression I'd been in. I think I watched the planes hit the buildings one too many times. Now when something bad happens, I light candles, invoke the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and meditate -- but I don't watch the news.

*She told me later, "One more week, and I was going to call your doctor."

found how many sex offenders? Using a computer program? How freaking much human verification of those designations was there? LJ just went through something similar, and there was a giant backlash, though the percentage of banned communities/groups was much smaller on LJ.

Also? False accusations are just as bad if not worse, and I don't trust a computer to accurately find these people by name and state....

I am aquiring a step-daughter here shortly, and she is going to be on a much longer leash than she has been up until this point. Her mother gets terrified if she's left home alone for more than about 20 min. The girl is almost 10. At that point, I was home alone from the time I got off the bus until the point when a parent got home after 5. I can't understand this fear of making her take responsibility.

Back in December of 2002, my mother asked me what my opinion was about all this Iraq war talk. I told her that I didn't think my opinion mattered much, but that I'd done some studying on the situation and I could tell her what I knew. And I laid it all out for her in about five minutes: 1) There was no evidence that Saddam had any current WMD capabilities, and the best evidence indicated that his last stockpiles were destroyed in the 1998 air raids ordered by Clinton and Blair. 2) Saddam was a secular Arab nationalist, and as such, a sworn enemy of pan-Islamic groups like al-Queda. He would have no reason to cooperate with groups out to destroy him. 3) Mesopatamia/Iraq has a history going back to the time of Alexander of offering invaders only token resistance, and then staging a long, bloody insurgency until the invaders leave. It is part of their national mythos, like Bunker Hill is for Americans. The British found this out in 1918. 4) Iraq is a hodgepodge of ethnic, religious, and tribal groups just waiting for a chance to kill each other. Saddam held together Iraq like Tito held together Yugoslavia.

I told her that the best case scenario would be that we would take Baghdad and kill or capture Saddam in a matter of weeks, that we would find no WMDs, that there would be no ties to al-Queda, that we would immediately face a low-level and steadily escalating insurgency, and that internecine and sectarian violence would threaten to erupt in civil war. I told her that my opinion was that sooner or later we would be forced to leave in disgrace, and the US would be decades recovering from the debacle. I told her all this back in 2002.

She didn't believe me. My own mother did not believe me. She believes Bill O'Reilly and Fox News. She's never since acknowledged that our conversation took place, and she's still a loyal Fox viewer and Bush apologist. Our relationship has never fully recovered.

Bill O'Reilly lies to old people and tears apart families. I hope this campaign has some success, but if I ever find myself alone with O'Reilly, I'm not offering any guarantees about my behavior.

Jon @61, keep in mind that MySpace claims to be getting a nearly quarter of a million new users per day. So accumulating 29,000 "sex offenders" in four years isn't so outlandish.

Also keep in mind that a "sex offender" might be a guy who was 19 when he slept with his 17-year-old girlfriend and her parents decided to be assholes about it.

About that parent thing:

It's hard to start letting go. But my kid (11) can now go to and from her grandmother's by herself (4 blocks, almost all streets with stoplights), go home by herself if we are walking around the neighborhood and I need to make one stop too many for her patience/feet (though not yet from the mile-away shopping strip, as that involves crossing a 10-12-lane divided road locally known as The Boulevard of Death), and stay at home alone for an hour and a half (working toward two hours).

She goes to karate by herself, but I still have to pick her up because the Y won't let her go home alone until next year, even though we live literally across the way. Her camp just this year is letting her get off the bus by herself if no one is downstairs to meet her; I wait with her in the AM, though, because sometimes the bus comes really, really late and we wind up calling the driver to see what's up.

Starting in September, my plan is to let her go at least part of the way to school by herself if she's still in the neighborhood school. If she can get on the city bus in front of our home, she can go the whole way by herself. Otherwise, she has to cross the Boulvard of Death to pick up the same bus at a different point on the route, and man, that is one scary road even for me, so I will be crossing her until next spring, I think. But once she's on the bus, she's on her own.

If she's commuting to Manhattan, though, I will have to take her and pick her up, at least for the first 6 months or so. I can just imagine what my work schedule will look like; otoh, I am not letting a kid who isn't 12 yet take 2-3 trains on her own. She can't even read the subway map yet, which is driving me crazy ("Mom, how many stops to where we're going?" "Look at the map, dear." "Mom, I can't find where we are!" AAAAAAAAHHHHH! [Though I didn't start commuting by subway regularly until 8th grade myself, when I was 13--the first year I went to Hunter, I took the express bus both ways]). I've just decided to bring one home and have her study up on it a bit.

I try not to over-schedule her, but in NYC at least, if she's not with an adult, she's still young enough that I could be charged with neglect. Which is weird, because she babysits from time to time.

So two days a week, after school, she goes to my mother's, where she can just hang out, go online, etc.--though she doesn't play outside because, well, none of her friends live close enough to us to meet up, even the ones who have SAHP and dont' go to a formal afterschool program. And two days she goes to the Y. And one day she goes to religious school, which she also attends on Sundays. And then Sunday afternoons, she takes karate for a couple of hours.

But. Without the afterschool program, she wouldn't know that she is a pretty sculptor. Or that, in her heart of hearts, she might want to act (and might be decent at it), but only if she gets to play villains and character parts.

Still, this is her last year of eligibility for the afterschool programs--she's aging out. And once she is in middle school, she'll be mostly on her own. So this year, I'm trying to train her to be on her own.

It's weird to do.

Serge (#54) Citizen Murdoch (at a glance, Wikipedia seems a reasonable summary) followed his father, Keith, into the newspaper business in Australia, building up from a problematic inheritance in 1952 (same as QEII), expanding to the UK, then deciding if Paris was worth a mass, US television was worth converting too.

and Jon (#51) MySpace passed 100,000,000 member's profiles in 2005. If we assume all the banned people are in fact 'real' sex offenders (not 16-year-olds boys convicted of having consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl), this makes the 29,000 somewhere less than 0.029 percent (29 in 100,000). It'd be interesting to compare this with the fraction of the population around the local shopping centre, school, sports facility or general neighbourhood that might be described that way.

Happy Birthday to all our horses!

Serge (#54) Citizen Murdoch (at a glance, Wikipedia seems a reasonable summary) followed his father, Keith, into the newspaper business in Australia, building up from a problematic inheritance in 1952 (same as QEII), expanding to the UK, then deciding if Paris was worth a mass, US television was worth converting too.

and Jon (#51) MySpace passed 100,000,000 member's profiles in 2005. If we assume all the banned people are in fact 'real' sex offenders (not 16-year-olds boys convicted of having consensual sex with a 15-year-old girl), this makes the 29,000 somewhere less than 0.029 percent (29 in 100,000). It'd be interesting to compare this with the fraction of the population around the local shopping centre, school, sports facility or general neighbourhood that might be described that way.

Happy Birthday to all our horses!

Patrick @ 30, I do, and I will.

They can take up to 30-60 seconds to work, as they cycle through multiple frequencies.

Heh heh heh.

Flippanter #57: I certainly don't think I've made much headway just asking people what it is that makes them think Jesus wants to watch us kill each other.

One of my favorite articles from The Onion: God Angrily Clarifies 'Don't Kill' Rule.

PNH @ 30: You mean "once there's a Democrat in the White House, the Supremes will rediscover how the President is not above the law and how the Constitution checks the power of the executive branch"?

Mez @ 67... I stand corrected about Rupert's origins.

Yes, Rupert was an Australian. He actually renounced Australian citizenship to become an American, and the Americans let him.

We cried. Well, that's what you call it when you have to stuff your hanky in your mouth, rock backwards and forwards, and make funny little noises, isn't it?

That point made above about both leftist and rightist media/blogs being fear-mongers certainly seems true to me -- and I'm a dedicated pessimist. But some of the "tin hat" discussions on this site have struck me as raw paranoia. I know things are in a terrible state, and the Democrats may not be our saviors, but check out Bush's plunging approval ratings. At least we aren't putting up bronze statues all over the place (front side Bush, back Cheney) and rolling over as he appoints himself president-for-life!

I expect this comment to provoke outraged responses from doom-sayers, but I still believe America isn't a full dictatorship populated by zombie True Believers. Maybe that's just because my 80-something Mom's a lifelong Democrat, and none of my (Northern California) relatives have taken a turn to the right.

It's OK to rant, but not to give up hope. I look back at the half of the 20th century where I *wasn't* around, and I'm amazed that humankind survived at all, yet here we are....

Faren @ 74... Thanks for the breath of optimism. I try to remind my wife that McCarthy must have looked unstoppable in the years before we were born, but he was stoppable, and America recovered. For a time anyway.

As far as fear of sexual predators and assault on young persons, it's like murder: Almost always by someone known to the victim, usually a family member. Incidents of assault by strangers are the exception, not the rule.

Whenever people start freaking out about strangers molesting their babies, I really want to tell them to worry about Uncle Lefty or Aunt Jeanne long before they worry about strangers. But that doesn't go over so well.

I can't understand this fear of making her take responsibility.

Of course you can't, because, not being the mother, you won't be blamed for whatever goes wrong. If a responsible child is harassed or, god forbid, hurt, get out of the way for the pile-on about how mommy was Irresponsible, Should Have Known Better and My God Don't You Know About Sexual Predators? (Daddies sometimes come in for finger-wagging as part of "parents", but let's not bullshit about who gets virtually all of the blame.)

I worry about letting my kids go out alone--because I'm afraid that they'll get hit by some asshole driving a Hummer while texting on his cellphone. Statistically that's a lot more likely than being grabbed off the street by a mysterious stranger.

It never fails to amaze me how the same people who sneer at Those Ay-Rabs for not letting women out alone are happy to impose the same purdah on their children.

I can't understand this fear of making her take responsibility.

Of course you can't, because, not being the mother, you won't be blamed for whatever goes wrong. If a responsible child is harassed or, god forbid, hurt, get out of the way for the pile-on about how mommy was Irresponsible, Should Have Known Better and My God Don't You Know About Sexual Predators? (Daddies sometimes come in for finger-wagging as part of "parents", but let's not bullshit about who gets virtually all of the blame.)

I worry about letting my kids go out alone--because I'm afraid that they'll get hit by some asshole driving a Hummer while texting on his cellphone. Statistically that's a lot more likely than being grabbed off the street by a mysterious stranger.

It never fails to amaze me how the same people who sneer at Those Ay-Rabs for not letting women out alone are happy to impose the same purdah on their children.

Faren, we're science fiction fans. We are, perhaps, a little too used to accepting the unlikely.

Then again, the politicians aren't tryng to give us cheap interstellar travel.

I have high standards when it comes to perversion. Bill O'Reilly's pathetic vanilla fantasies detailed in Andrea Mackris's sexual-harassment complaint against him just don't make the cut, in my view.

More importantly, using "pervert" as a club with which to beat upon O'Reilly adds to the climate of hate and loathing in which real perverts have to contend with as we live our lives.

Speaking of BillO, someone at Kos gives him a taste of his own tactics.
I don't know whether to laugh or be appalled.

Re overcontrol of children:

I was born in 1961 and raised in a small rural Georgia town, where I had considerable freedom (basically, "get home by dark"). As a result, I encountered a fellow in his 60s who liked little girls. He figured he could feel me up and get away with it, because he told me not to tell. I told; he got away with it (my mom didn't want to embarrass his wife).

Needless to say I have mixed feelings about unrestrained childhood. I have three daughters, and have been pretty strict about knowing where they are and who they're with. Has that cramped their style more than decades of fearing men and feeling betrayed by my mom cramped mine? I don't know.

This reminds me of what my mother said: The fifties were a good tiem to raise children but she didn't want to live in that time again (hindsight, I think: the things that we didn't know about then, adn do now).

I remember walking to school, even in third grade, without worrying about what might possibly happen. My parents didn't have fits if we played outside or went around the block. We couldn't be overscheduled, because there weren't all the programs and organized everything, and I think we were better off without being scheduled all the time. (Once we got to junior high, we were old enough to be considered responsible and to be left at home without a sitter for a weekend.)

When I was 10 and 11 I rode a bike to school 1.5 miles away up Westwood Blvd in LA, which was undoubtedly as busy then as it is now. Saturdays I rode a couple of miles along Olympic Blvd to the branch library. Mom was a grad student at UCLA and Dad was overseas; there weren't a lot of alternatives to me getting places on my own, so that's what I did. I don't recall the societal paranoia being as severe back then as it is now, but I'm sure there were just as many (or as few) pedophiles lurking about Los Angeles in the early 60s. She and I were more worried about getting killed by a car.

When I was a mere lad, I'd walk 2 miles to the parish center for their weekend movie matinees. In the middle of winter. Along the town's busiest street, which had no sidewalk. Crazy? Maybe, but that's how, at the age of nine, my first exposure to Ben Hur was on the Big Screen.

(Not my usual id, because some things I don't want linked with my online identity, thankewverymuch. TPTB can check my IP if required.)

I was born in 1970, and raised by hippies in my early childhood. Everyone watched the children, and sometimes, no one did. Which is how I ended up in the wrong garage, at about age six, with the wrong (adult) man, at the wrong time. I didn't tell my parents for 14 years, being the strange, private child I was.

But though that was a damaging experience, I think the freedoms that I enjoyed counterbalanced some of the damage. I may not have trusted men, but I trusted myself, having learned to do so while wandering around on my own, unsupervised private errands. I know that my contemporaries benefited from the freedom they got.

What we have now seems to damage all children to save a few of them.

Serge@85: When I was a mere lad, I'd walk 2 miles to the parish center for their weekend movie matinees. In the middle of winter. Along the town's busiest street, which had no sidewalk.

uphill, both ways.

Greg London @ 87... But the slope's incline was quite moderate. Both ways.

Lila at 82, yes, just that.

I have tried to learn the distinction between hypervigilance and reasonable concern; having to use public transportation all my life has helped. Since I don't drive, and since my kids attended a small private school with no transportation, they learned to use the bus and to go out in public safely; this did, more than once, include a "how to recognize and avoid the creeps" talk.

I'm nine years your elder, and the thing we share is that we were assumed to be safe when, in fact, we were not, and that adults closed ranks against us when we complained about it. There has to be a middle point where kids are taught to be safe, and where the social stigma falls on the exploiters.

I just had some fun w/ Google Earth, measuring distances. When I was six, I was expected to walk .4 miles each way to school, on my own, even if there was a barking collie of whom I was absolutely terrified.

Two years later, after we'd moved, they stopped running the schoolbus near my house, and I would have had to walk one and a quarter miles each way. I'd already had some allergy problems show up, so I was able to change schools to the one whose bus ran right along the back of our yard. Nobody argued that the long walk itself was not safe, just that it was bit bit long for an 8-year-old with sinus problems.

I took the bus on my own to piano lessons.

Half way through junior high, we moved across town; by then I was doing a fair amount of wandering around downtown by myself after school: trips to the library, little shopping expeditions, including to the cigar store that also sold SF. There were probably all sorts of dubious types congregating in there, buying the Racing Form and the less savory magazines, but nobody seemed worried about anything happening to me. (I was a lot more worried personally about the dubious teenagers hanging out at the bakery a couple of doors down.)

We moved again, out of state, and to finish high school, I walked home every day I didn't get a ride with some friend from whatever club was meeting that day; it was just about 2 miles. (I was able to get a ride to school w/ my teacher mother, whose own school was about half a mile away, but it meant always getting there half an hour early.)

I was always encouraged to play outside, or to go over to friends' houses; my parents were far more interested in getting me socialized at almost any cost than they were worried about boogey-men. I was expected to say whose house I was going to, but there was always some slush in the system.

The first time I remember being alone after school was in third grade, when my grandmother, who lived with us, rushed off to be with her sick brother for a couple of weeks. Lectures on not opening the door to strangers, and prohibitions against cooking, in case I caught the house on fire, but certainly not a case for anyone panicking.

Sounds like none of this freedom, which was positively required for me to be able to grow up, is on offer these days. Very depressing. I keep seeing articles in the NYT education supplement and other places about "helicopter parents" who are so into monitoring their children as a lifestyle that they can't stop when the kid goes off to school. I thought, when I was teaching a decade or more ago, that students seemed to be a little less independent than when I were a freshman, but what these articles suggest is downright scary.

Similar situation to #86, although I don't post often at all.

As a response, too, my parents were fairly attentive during my childhood. Meeting the fifteen-year-old kid across the street, I quickly became friends with him. Over a period of months, he began moving our hangouts into more and more secluded areas, which culminated with him playing 'doctor' in the basement of my house. My parents were upstairs.

After that happened, my parents clamped down tight (understandably, I think.) I had a 'safe zone' which I was restricted to outside of school. It took me a while to be comfortable visiting people at their homes outside of school, because in my mind I was outside THE ZONE, and as such extremely nervous.

Even though most of my childhood was lonely and awkward, I find it hard to fault my parents for their actions. I certainly wouldn't do the same as them, having had to live through it, but they did their best in an extremely difficult situation.

That outlook, though, the 'be afraid of going outside and experiencing things because you might get hurt' attitude, is one that I've been fighting ever since.

That's what I lament most about this attitude towards child-raising - not that kids won't be able to explore, but that they'll be too afraid. Like I was.

This would have been in the nineties, by the way.

The media blitz on "safety" is not just about kids and aimed at parents.* The treatment of the risks of perscription medicines has caused several very useful drugs to be taken out of use, when simply monitoring the risks would have allowed those who need them to use them at no risk to those who don't.

As an example, my partner is currently trying (and only partly succeeding) to deal with not having the one medicine that can ameliorate her acid reflux without severe side-effects (as in killer migraines from Hell, or massive stomach cramps). The drug was removed from the market because of a risk of heart problems that the manufacturer did not disclose in a timely fashion. Every doctor we've talked to says that the drug simply needs to be prescribed more carefully, and that it will be returned to the market once the FDA and the manufacturer have agreed on new warnings and patient selection criteria, but no one can say how long that will take. In the meantime, there are days when Eva doesn't get to do much but wait for the pain to go away. And she doesn't get to say that she would rather risk heart problems than the throat cancer that she is assured the acid will ultimately cause.

Much as I agree that this atmosphere of fear** is much worse than in past decades, I see parallels in some attitudes that have been prevalent in America for some time. The distrust of the FDA and Big Pharma has been well-earned, but it seems to have metastasized into a fear of any medical risk, even when the benefit might be high. The same situation occurred in the 70's, when attitudes started turned against nuclear power in the US. The nuclear energy industry earned a good part of that, with a poor record for reliability, lack of adherence to safety standards, and a willingness to cut corners to add to their profits. The resultant terror of nuclear technology in general was an overreaction that left us with fewer short-term options when dealing with climate change became a politically non-suicidal position.

* Though as many here have pointed out, raising fears for our children has become a major industry. I may have mentioned before that one of our local TV stations has taken to putting all sexual offender stories at the beginning of the newscast, to the exclusion of all other news that doesn't involve violent death.

** the "Deimosphere"?

in April of this year, Bruce Schneier posted an excerpt about child abduction here. To quote:

rates of child abduction and sexual abuse have marched steadily downward since the early 1990s, fear of these crimes is at an all-time high. ... A child is almost as likely to be struck by lightning as kidnapped by a stranger, but it's not fear of lightning strikes that parents cite as the reason for keeping children indoors

I don't find that it's fear of abduction or sexual abuse that is my biggest worry. I'm neither married nor divorced and have no exes who might want to snatch my kid. I've no boyfriend or creepy uncle who might fondle her (well, I do have a creepy uncle, but he's creepy for other reasons).

I'm most afraid of stupidity. The sort of stupidity that gets a teenager only a few years older than my child run over and killed at a nearby intersection because she was being chased by a group of slightly older teenagers who ran her into the street. Why didn't she run into the drugstore on that corner? Because that store has a policy of asking teens to leave because the store is afraid of shoplifting, so she didn't feel it was a safe haven.

The high school near us runs triple shift and there are large groups of teens on the street at several of the times when my kid would by walking around/hanging out, and because I've had my own less-than-pleasant run-ins with those kids and I'm a lot older, bigger, and more capable of making a hell of a lot of noise than my 11-yo.

Because there are weirdos everywhere--not abusers, not criminals, just weirdos--and there are days when we run into them endlessly. Like the LOL in the supermarket last night who chastised me and dd over the kid's outfit (long black tank top and short skort, 3 strings of black beads, 1 airbrush tattoo of a sea turtle, 1 stick-on tattoo of a heart punctured by a knife, crossed by a banner that reads, "I love the Dewey Decimal System") on the grounds that dd was showing too much skin (um, it's July, and bare arms and legs are not too much skin).

She doesn't have a good repertoire of responses to these things yet. Heck, there are times when I don't have good responses, like the morning some asshole nearly wanked off into my hair (he was standing and I was seated) on the subway before I realized what he was doing and Got Loud. I know that until she experiences some of it, she won't develop good responses. So it's a tough line to walk.

And I'm nowhere near as bad as many of the parents I know, who truly are helicopter parents.

On the supervision thin