This page ©2001
Chip Brown.

Get Hurt

It is my opinion that there is something more harmful to your health than cigarettes, drugs and alcohol combined. This thing carries no surgeon general's warning and even children can legally possess them. In fact, I have seen parents openly encourage their kids to go out and find these things for themselves. They do this with no regard for their child's safety.

We would lock a parent up for buying their kids cigarettes. We'd lock them up for allowing their 12 year old to drive a car. We worry about our kids getting guns. Yet there is something we encourage our kids to have that is more dangerous than most of these things combined. And still if our child refuses to get one we take him\her to a psychiatrist, because surely there is something wrong with a child that doesn't want one.

"It's only funny until someone gets hurt." That's what our fifth grade teacher told us at Maynardville Elementary School. She was right, everything was funny until someone got hurt. That's when it just got plain hillarious.

So what is this thing we encourage our kids to aquire? What is this thing that our violent culture forces us to want our kids to have?

FRIENDS!

Back in the 5th grade there was this boy named Darrell something or other, who was really accident prone. My friend Tony and myself dared him to go higher and higher on the swings. Higher and higher he swung as we screamed with glee. Now, granted in the 5th grade we hadn't had physics yet. The concept of what goes up must come down was in chapter 8, we were only on chapter 5.

Certainly, it was funny to see the look of terror on Darrell's face as he swung higher and higher. Now, we ask ourselves today, why would Darrell do such a thing if he was afraid. Well, one of he rules of the playground was, no matter what you're afraid of, looking like a wuss was worse.

Once declared a wuss, you open yourself up to wedgies, wet willies and terrible taunting. Poor Darrell had no choice but to swing higher and higher as a crowd gathered to watch his daring do.

As much as it's always amazed me that a crowd gathers to watch some dufus do something dangerous, it's always amazed me more how fast a crowd can disperse. Yes sir, you let a fifth grader plunge head first from the swings and crack his head open, the crowd has a way of scattering.

I guess we figured since we dared him to do it, it was mine and Tony's responsibility to carry Darrell's bloody carcass into the school. There we searched out the first teacher and declared that Darrell, after failing to heed our warnings of the danger of his actions, fell from the swings and rendered himself unconcious.

He got the coolest stitches! Right across the top of his forehead just like Frankenstein. Got to miss a week of school too!

The greatest motivators are friends. A friend can cause you to do anything you can imagine and some things you hadn't imagined yet. That's why I intend to forbid my child from having friends. I for one think that you should be 18 to even try friends. In fact, I think our government should spend billions on encouraging our kids to just say no, to friends. Without friends, the world would be a better place.

Just makes sense doesn't it?

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