It's OK to Deafen Children
Suppose a local council was to hold a public concert for teens, sponsored by a cigarette company and as a bonus they could give away a free pack of cigarettes to each attendee. There would, understandably, be a public outrage. In reality, of the people who accepted a pack of free cigarettes, some would already be smokers, others would give them to friends or family who smoke, and of the rest a small proportion would try them. Of these a very small proportion would actually take up the habit, and probably would have started smoking anyway. The majority will dislike the experience, as happens to most people who try smoking for the first time. The upshot is that in reality it is unlikely, though possible, that anyone would take up smoking as a direct result of this.
Some years ago I lived in an inner city apartment opposite the gardens in the heart of Brisbane. The council used to put on concerts, mainly for young people. These were so loud that even in my apartment the noise was deafening. It was certainly causing damage to the kid's ears, possibly even permanent. The arbiters of child protection who are very quick to 'expose' cigarette companies were silent about this, although it was probably far more damaging. Similarly, it is not uncommon for diet soda drinks to be sold or even given away at these concerts although there is considerable evidence that Aspartame, the sweetener in these drinks, can trigger Parkinson's disease.
When it comes to children, rationality seems to go completely out of the window. Causes go in and out of fashion and when a cause become fashionable there's a huge lobby of people who will attempt to persuade everyone round to their way of thinking. Currently, smoking tobacco is out but smoking marijuana is apparently OK. Leaving children unattended in cars is out. A London couple were recently charged in New York for leaving their baby unattended in their car whilst they took their other children to the toilet. "… he believed his sleeping daughter was safe in the locked car with a slightly opened window and did not want to awaken her and bring her out in the cold at the suburban Green Acres mall in Long Island, New York". This is OK in London but not in New York.
In Australia Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter, has been criticised for bringing
his one-month old child into a crocodile enclosure. People who weren't there,
and have no understanding of crocodiles, said it was putting his child at risk.
This, apparently, is a mortal sin. The same people who will trust a pilot when
in an airplane would not trust him, a world expert, with crocodiles. There's
a vocal group of people who seem to think that they are the arbiters of how
to bring up children and want to impose their own narrow, and irrational, ideas
onto everyone else. God help us.
