Quite Upsetting

Photo Credit: Turkinator

My last post ‘little of this’ I talked about how surprised I was when a teen girl told me she believed that she couldn’t ride a bike for two miles. I have been thinking about this a lot and trying (without much success) to understand how this could happen.

Today I found the answer. Karl Marx is quoted as saying “Religion is the Opiate of the Masses” I have always taken this as meeting that Religion (not faith) is what keeps people docile, controllable, predictable. While I am willing to admit that there still is an ‘Opiate of the Masses’ it is no longer Religion. Today as I sat in a booth at a local Eat-n-Park with my sister and her family (daughter, son-in-law, grand babies) I walked back to the salad bar and passed a young family with two young kids. Both kids sat staring into portable DVD players with headphones on.

My friends, you would of been proud of me. I wanted to slap the parents and call CYS and report a serious case of Child Neglect. I paused only long enough to realize that both kids were watching the same show, at a table, in Eat-n-Park, on DVD players.

These are the kids who are raised to believe in not what they can do, instead they are raised by what they can’t do. After work I usually head out, either going for a walk, or taken my bike for a ride. What shocks me about my time outside isn’t what I see, but what I don’t see.

I don’t see any other bikes outside.
I don’t see any one outside.
No kids playing.
No one walking.

Parents won’t walk the mile to the drugstore and take the car instead, this teaches the children that they can’t walk the mile. This teaches the young pretty fit teen aged girl at shop and save that not only is she incapable of riding a bike two miles to the store but there is no reason for her to ride those two miles.

After all that is what the car is for.