Diminishing Returns

This is what we're giving up by regulating and enforcing every precaution against danger—the old freedom vs. protection argument so aptly being demonstrated in the airline industry since 9/11. We need to instead weigh the risks, examine the odds and take prudent but wise measures to protect against real dangers.

What real dangers? Well, I'm not so much worried about my children becoming one of the 115 children abducted by strangers each year in the United States as I am about teaching them to work hard, to be kind and compassionate. I'm not so worried about the odds of them developing a life-threatening peanut allergy or breaking their neck on the neighbor's trampoline, as I am about teaching them to avoid materialism, dishonesty and corruption. The chances of my children being involved in a tragic school shooting—and my heart aches for those families who were—is less than the chance of them learning to cheat their way through school. One set of dangers is relatively remote while the others ever present and has ethical and moral consequences, which to me are in the end more important. I want to spend my time teaching my children to be the solution to society's problems rather than attempting to shelter them from society.

But even amid these abstractions, amid dangers that are harder to see than the latest bombing on the six o'clock news, I am comforted by hope.

Hope that the violence, though well-publicized, will continue to be rare, hope that our families can survive a crazy world intact, hope that our children will turn out "okay," and that the good and decent people all around us—the ones paying taxes, volunteering at soup kitchens, donating to charities, standing up for goodness—will be doing their best right alongside us. Without hope we've lost what chance we might have had at success. So every morning I suck it up, give the kids a hug and a kiss, send them off to school and say a prayer. What other choice is there?

There is no way to protect ourselves—or our children—from every risk inherent in our mortality and when we try we pay too great of a price. What price? Well, now that the boys can't play WALL BALL. They're left without their favorite form of exercise—and what child in America today couldn't use more exercise?