I’ve been seeing internet memes along this theme for a few years now — not to mention hearing these ideas expressed via conversation. The implication is always: “these silly modern rules are unnecessary”, the “proof” being that “we survived without those rules”. Some of the memes are more explicit than others about how wrong the current “oppressive” rules are. The one I’ve posted here begins with “tough generation”, implying that all it took to survive without the safety rules was toughness.

This one isn’t difficult to debunk.

First, let me say, I am part of a generation that experienced most of these things. My parents’ generation saw even more of it. I have fond memories of riding in cars without seatbelts, playing with toy guns, playing outside without supervision, etc. I don’t see any reason why anyone should be ashamed of those things. But spankings and lead paint? I can’t understand why they’re grouped in with the rest. That’s part of what makes this the subject of my series “Silly Meme Saturday”.

The slang term gish gallop refers to the “spewing [of] many different points all at once”, in the knowledge that all of them can’t be defeated with a single argument. This isn’t a logical fallacy in itself; it’s a technique that often incorporates a bunch of logical fallacies. In only 23 words, the meme above has presented a variety of topics, each with a different refutation, the sum total of which cannot be presented in 23 words.

Yes, one could respond with a simple “bullhonkey” or “wrong!”, but that doesn’t accomplish anything or convince anyone of anything.

Still, in this case, the several points of the gish gallop are relatively easily refuted. Let’s go.

Spankings

Spankings are relatively easy to survive, so there’s nothing to be proud of here. If done “correctly”, a spanking is not meant to cause lasting physical harm. That’s like saying “I survived a wasp sting”. Well duh. It hurts, and might teach a lesson (watch out for wasps), but isn’t something that normally kills.

Of course, the meme is responding to modern anti-spanking sentiment using a strawman argument. No one has ever said “we shouldn’t spank kids because it’ll kill them” or “stop spanking because only a few will survive”. The well-documented case against spanking says something entirely different. Fifty years of research with more than 160,000 children has shown that it just doesn’t work, and actually causes lasting emotional, social, and cognitive harm. The conclusions are “extremely telling and very clear and consistent about the negative effects on children”. Basically, there is no benefit to it.

While I was spanked as a child (and I imagine most of my readers were too), even in school, and can easily say “I survived” without any animosity toward those who spanked me, it seems pretty clear that this shouldn’t translate into “therefore I should continue the tradition.”

Lead Paint

I’m pretty sure I survived this too, though I don’t know for certain which places still had lead paint during my lifetime. And I’ve heard stories that my father was actually caught eating lead paint when he was a child. He seems okay (most of the time).

If you too survived lead paint in your childhood, it doesn’t make you “tough” as much as it makes you fortunate. Lead, like most substances (even water), is toxic in excessive doses. And our society formerly used lead in wildly excessive doses, not just in paint but in gasoline, stained glass, figurines, pottery, pewter, batteries, and more. The list of possible harm from lead poisoning is long, and is not limited to purely physical ailments — it can include behavioral and mental problems.

The systematic and regulatory removal of lead from our paint, gas, and other products is not a statement on your “toughness” but on our progress as a society. When the free market determined it would not act in a moral way, the government did so. That is all.

Wooden Playgrounds

I don’t even know what this line means. Most of the playgrounds I used as a child were made of metal. Blisteringly hot metal under the southern sun. Metal with rusty, sharp edges. I specifically recall my Dad inspecting slides before letting us go down them, making sure there weren’t any dangerous pointy spots — and sometimes he wouldn’t let us use them. And there still are wooden playgrounds, even new ones. Just as examples, there’s a very nice, mostly wooden playground in Seminole, Oklahoma, and my children recently played on another one in Vancouver, Washington.

Second-hand Smoke

Really. Surviving that means you’re “tough”?

When I was a child, people smoked in airplanes, theaters, grocery stores — pretty much any place where the owner didn’t risk offending people by banning it. Even non-smokers often kept at least one ashtray in the home, just in case a smoker came to visit.

According to a 2014 Surgeon General’s report: “Since 1964, approximately 2,500,000 nonsmokers have died from health problems caused by exposure to secondhand smoke.” Yes, that’s less than one percent of Americans, spread over a 50-year period. But it’s more people than were killed by firearms in the U.S. over the same period of time, more even than traffic fatalities over the same 50 years. And, unlike smoking directly (first-hand smoke), the ingestion of second-hand smoke was almost always involuntary — someone else was doing it to you against your will.

“I survived my parents and their friends and nearly half the general public slowly pumping poison into me when I was a child” is what this sounds like. And the implication that it should still be legal because you, personally, survived it is asinine.

Toy Guns

Toy guns are still very much legal and available, so this point makes as little sense as the wooden playground line. Kids today are still “surviving” toy guns (with notable exceptions like Tamir Rice, Andy Lopez, and several others).

If the meme is supposed to refer to existing and proposed laws requiring toy guns to be “brightly colored”, it should be obvious those efforts hope to prevent at least some of the wrongful deaths at the hands of police.

No Seatbelts Or Helmets

I survived this too. On road trips, we children used to take turns sitting in the back of the station wagon, where there was a little more privacy for reading or listening to music. Almost all of us never died while doing this. We rode our bikes without helmets, and a lot of us escaped without serious head injuries.

This doesn’t make us “tough”; it makes us lucky. My parents were careful drivers, for one thing; maybe yours were too. Still, someone else could have caused an accident that no amount of toughness on my part would have helped. The fact is, seatbelts do help prevent injury, in most cases, and the arguments against them aren’t logical.

As for bicycle helmets, only 21 states require them, and even then it’s only for young children. Twenty-nine states have no bicycle helmet laws. While they’re probably not as effective as formerly claimed, bicycle helmets still certainly reduce the severity of head injuries sustained in bike crashes, and can be especially preventative for children still learning how to ride — usually operating at slower speeds and generally safer conditions anyway.

Bicycle helmets for children aren’t expensive, can help them overcome fear of learning to ride, and actually can prevent serious head injury during the learning process. There’s no reason to be proud of not using them.

Play Without Supervision

Current trends are in two directions. Some parents are going in the “helicopter parent” direction, overly micromanaging every activity of their child(ren). Others are pushing in the “free range parent” direction. Neither one, carried to an extreme, seems like a good idea to me. The struggle today, just as it was during my own childhood, is to find the correct balance between overparenting and sheer neglect.

I think my own parents found a good balance — most of the time. I wasn’t allowed to wander freely, doing anything and everything I wanted; but they also generally had their own stuff to do and left us to our own devices a decent percentage of the time. Some of this was made easier by our location, in the distant, nearly-rural suburbs. From ages six through 11, I lived on a five-acre plot; we could roam quite a bit without ever leaving the property. That is understandably more difficult where most people live — in closely-packed neighborhoods with tiny lots.

If the meme meant a complete lack of supervision, then we’re talking about parents who abdicated their role as care-givers to their children, which was illegal and immoral back then just as it is now. If, on the other hand, it’s just a push-back against the complete control-of-play that some parents engage in, then I think almost everyone agrees.

Drinking From The Hose

I’m certain this line refers to articles like this one (“Toxic Garden Hose Water: Drinking From Common Water Hoses Potentially Dangerous, Study Finds”).

First, this refers to a single study (not a scientific consensus), which can usually be taken with a grain of salt. Second, the warnings are about surprising amounts of lead and BPAs found in water from garden hoses. Lead, we’ve already talked about above. As for BPAs, the science is still out. Some of the same governmental organizations usually derided for over-regulation of our health have said BPA isn’t harmful to humans at current levels of exposure, including the EPA, the European Food Safety Authority, and the UK’s Food Standards Agency.

Personally, I’d be more worried about the bacteria that thrive in stagnant hose water between uses, though that is usually flushed out within a few seconds of turning on the spigot. And I’ve never known anyone, even somewhat rural outdoorsy kids like myself, who ever drank extensively from garden hoses. I’m not even sure why the meme-maker went through the trouble of mentioning this one.

Conclusion

While the people who make memes like this tend toward Libertarian lines of thought, the meme doesn’t make the point it’s trying to.

A few of the lines don’t make sense at all, like the wooden playground, toy gun, and hose water sections. Because no one is trying to ban them, and these activities are still widespread. The others are based on a false sense that surviving these events means a person is “tough”, when what they actually mean is that we were lucky, or that we simply didn’t know back then what we know now.

If you honestly want to go back to the days when people could smoke in McDonald’s and on airline flights, when no one had to wear seatbelts (and many cars didn’t even have seatbelts in the back), and when paint was saturated with lead dust and gasoline-burning cars sprayed lead all over the landscape, then I question not only your sanity, but your morality — because of the direct and measurable harm caused to others.

And if you think toy guns or wooden playgrounds have been banned, you might need to visit more parks or toy stores.

Comments From Original URL:

Michael Zeiler, 2016.08.20, 10:31

I don’t get the point of these “false analogy” memes either. They seem to me to be trying to say that because my generation grew up this way and turned out alright, the next generation is growing up all wrong. Obvious bullshit. For the generation prior, it may have listed small pox, world wars, dust bowls, cholera, segregation, etc.

If I may suggest a topic for you. MSN had a comparison piece of the cost of an emergency room visit for the year you were born. But they gave no equal comparison of the tests performed or the treatments given. I’d be interested in reading your thorough breakdown of it.

Wil C. Fry (in reply to Michael Z), 2016.08.20, 10:40

"If I may suggest a topic for you..."

Any time! I’ll take a look at the MSN story you mentioned. (I assume you mean this one: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/personalfinance/the-cost-of-a-trip-to-the-emergency-room-the-year-you-were-born/ss-BBv7wML?li=BBnb7Kz ?

It was $108 the year I was born, which seems reasonable to me. ;-)

Recently, I was looking at the bill from my birth. It was something like $300 for the entire thing. My daughter’s birth 38 years later cost 260 times as much (though all things were not equal).

It’s an interesting topic, so I will keep it in mind. Thank you.