Dancing in the street

As I drive around our small town, I wonder who's teaching modern children to act this way. True, the kids that we pass by when we walk in the park often wave very politely. It's the skateboard crowd that puzzles me. We have an ultra-cool skateboard park that resembles a dry swimming pool with rounded edges complete with a full pipe. There are usually quite a few kids there. We also encounter many skateboarders riding in the street, coming around a blind turn, going down the middle of the street, crossing where there is no crosswalk, stuff like that. A friendly tap on the horn to alert two teenage boys with the bodies of grown men to our presence in the street was greeted with obscenity.

Now when I was growing up in the country, my dad would take us for bike rides on the road. When we heard a car coming, we stopped our bikes and waited in the ditch for the car to go by. If we were going for a walk, we got well off the road when a car came, too. Some people might consider that to be a little extreme, to some it's just common sense, to me it's somewhere in the middle.

Skateboarding in the street is not in the middle. Is it a death wish? If so, I'm told that it works for about 2 kids a year. Is it adrenaline, rage against the machine, have they been bullied away from the park? Now I admit that the last one is inevitable for a certain amount of kids. But call me old school, I think our underactive cops should haul them down to the station and call mommy and daddy to come pick them up after a little lesson, something like, "the street is for cars".

Well, that's a bit of a tirade, but I have a horror of seeing one of those kids in the emergency room, or worse, the morgue, one day.

Stay safe,

Rose