Childhood and Congress Tom Smith

This is mildly amusing.  Mostly about cap and trade and its (let us hope) imminent demise.  But what I want to do is push back a bit on this meme that seems to be growing in the RWB, and that is, that we have taken too much of the danger out of childhood, and we should put it back in.  WH Mead speaks nostalgically of the M-80s and cherry bombs he played with as a youth.  Well, wait a minute.  I remember my childhood and all the dangerous things we did, and many of us are lucky to be alive.  We don't need our kids to be doing a lot of that stuff.  Our parents would have stopped us, if they knew what we were up to.  I mean gasoline bombs.  No, kids do not need to play with gasoline bombs.  Cherry bombs down toilets, ditto.  Riding bicycles down steep hills with no helmets.  Not necessary.  Violent games of tackle football with no equipment.  People did get hurt.  Dirt clod fights.  Is it really necessary to throw dirt clods at people's heads as hard as you can?  Eyes should have been put out.  Dropping things on cars from upper floors, such as garbage bags full of water.  Again, unnecessary and dangerous.  Anything that involves fleeing from the police is a bad idea.  Disrupting large hornets' nests and running for your life:  there I think the benefits outweigh the costs, but still, care is demanded.  I'm not saying I did any of these things, but they were are more common than they should have been when I was growing up.  Homemade projectile weapons need adult supervision IMHO.  Somewhere between helicopter parents and shooting at helicopters with your .22 there is a happy medium.  A lot of these people saying, let's have dangerous childhoods never almost died when they were kids, or so I'm guessing.  Let's keep it real.  Kids can be savages and they need to be policed.  Forget that at your peril.