"El Neil" is THAT kind of uncle

L. Neil Smith writes about the differences between being a child today and being a child a generation ago:

[. . .] the message listed fun things we all did as children — all of us who are over 35, that is — that the Safety Nazis would be aghast at today. Things like drinking from the garden hose, or not wearing helmets when we rode our bikes. According to those Nazis, says the message, we should all be dead by now. It was pretty funny, and I could have added a few more items, myself, most of them involving firecrackers.

Hell, I used to chew on my dad's split-shot fishing sinkers, cast of pure lead, which will surprise none of the people who don't like me.

Many of the items on the list amused me, as they were meant to do, taking me back to a bygone era (I'm way over 35) in which I grew up. One of them, however, seemed to leap off the page and slap me in the face:

"We would leave home in the morning and play all day," says the message, "as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day." And it's completely true. Even my own mother, who was a nervous, overly-protective woman, expected my brother and me to be somewhere else most of the day, doing who knew what.

Probably something involving firecrackers.

I always hesitate to disagree with El Neil, but the point he goes on to make is that children were in less danger then than now. I see his point, and I agree that there was less danger, but children were certainly not in no danger even in those idyllic days. A woman I know was nearly raped — at age seven — less than a block from her home in Toronto in the late 1950's. She was saved by the intervention of her mother, who scared off the teenage assailant (but who didn't believe her daughter when she was told that it was more than just "wrestling" that got over-enthusiastic).

The perception of danger to children was far lower in those days, and the media coverage of horrific crimes tended to be local only (and therefore more immediate, but less likely to inculcate a belief that the danger was omnipresent). Rape and sexual assault was still regarded as being partly or wholly the victim's fault in those days: and therefore much less likely to be reported. "Good girls" didn't get into that sort of scrape, so if a girl found herself victimized she had the choice of reporting it (and proving herself to be, by definition, a "bad" girl) or pretending it never happened.

The past, we are told, is a foreign land. This is true even when the past is still within living memory.