I know this probably belongs in the Lounge section, but in many ways this has to do with the news.
How many of you think we live in darker times than we did say, 20, 30, 50 years ago. Because it seems we are sucumbing to a more risk free way of life, especially within the West.
One such problem is how the news seems to have "paedo paranoia", that we must protect the children, that children should never be allowed to go anywhere on there own and so on. It's as if paedophiles and child killers have only just appeared in the last 10 years. I know when I was a kid, every weekend me and my friends would go over the park to play football, go to school on my own, ride bikes a couple of miles away to see friends and guess what? We all survived the experience. Another one is disciplining children in general. That seems frowned upon. Teachers are not allowed to do anything to kids now. And again, were our parents or grandparents permanantly scarred from a little coroporate punishment in education? And people wonder why teenagers today have zero respect for their elders. I've noticed with a couple of threads recently about the nature of dogs, how dangerous dogs are, etc. So, dogs weren't dangerous 30 years ago? I mean what is going on here? The Media is basically turning us into pussies. I mean im sure many, many of us could give other examples of apparant dangers that seem to only have appeared now.
Is the sense of adventure and exploration at the same level as a few decades (centuries?) ago, or even higher, or has it declined. If it's declined, is it because there's now many more artificial ways of scratching its itch, and are these distancing us from the "real world"?
Are we succumbing to a more risk-free general way of life, both in terms of change and personal risk? Another reason this could be is because people are afraid of being sued to Hell and back for everything they own, will own or might have owned.
Someone cuts their hand at work, and the Doctor gives them two weeks off work. A kid gets a nose bleed and its like the end of the world.
Is this a bad thing?
Or are the risks still there and still being taken, but perhaps in a less visible format?
We are turning into frightened sheep, each year, something new in the Media is fabricated to put the fear of God in us. Too much of this or too little of that is bad for our diet, every non english speaking country wants to bring about the end of civilisation, in the next ten years we'll reach 1 million ppm for CO2 emmisions, we can't say this because it will offend someone, we must say this because we need to be patriotic, studies show that *insert crap* will raise the risk of cancer by 2%.....and so on.
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