A couple of notable bits in these two issues-
June- Lenore Skenazy, founder of Free Range Kids ( http://freerangekids.wordpress.com/) explains “Why I let my 9-year-old ride the subway alone.” Apparently lots of horrified parents demanded to know how she would feel if her son were abducted while out alone in the city. She told them about statistics showing how safe NYC is these days, and how rare child-abduction is. I couldn’t help but wonder which is less rare, abduction of children out on their own or violent home invasions. For all I know the kid might face less danger of attack by strangers while wandering alone through Alphabet City than he would sitting in his own living room. The column is funny, and so doesn’t treat that question.
July- Dave Maleckar’s “100 Word Rant” is titled “brain brain what is brain”- some guys over 35 will recognize the reference (http://100wordrant.blogspot.com/2008/03/brain-brain-what-is-brain.html).
acilius
believer1
lefalcon
losthunderlads
vthunderlad
Panther Red 
lefalcon
/ June 30, 2008This reminded me a little bit of discussions in Yemen about how safe Yemen is. To what extent does anybody’s opinion about the relative safety of any locale really reflect much of anything…beyond whatever “narrative” they idiosyncratically happen to feel like propagating about that locale? The lady who “fell down and couldn’t get up” probably felt her home was pretty darn safe. Unless she lived in, like, STATEN ISLAND, in which case she was petrified in her home. And justifiably. Staten Island is one fucked up place. People drink straight from the toilet there. And horses still can’t vote.
acilius
/ July 1, 2008Fuck yeah!
When I was writing the thing about home invasions I thought of something I heard in a class once, that a counselor shouldn’t respond to a client’s irrational fear by bringing up another fear to oppose it. An obsessive-compulsive will not discard the original fear, instead adding other fears to it and adopting even more elaborate and self-destructive compulsive behaviors in response to them.
So I suppose it would have been wrong of Skenazy to raise the prospect of danger at home as a rebuttal to the fears of those who lock their children up due to their fears of dangers outside. It probably reveals something unpleasant about me that it was my first thought. Anyway, there it is.