Dartblog

So I am down at Blood’s Seafood in Wilder to pick up some lobster for dinner, and as we always do, the kids and I are reaching into the ice-cold water in the tanks to pick up “ocean cockroaches,” as a vegetarian friend calls them. The kids know where to grab the critters (behind the head), and on this occasion, they were showing their skills to some friends from Italy who had never before seen Maine lobsters.

As my son tells it, while I have my back turned to pay the bill, a 45-ish man tells him, “Young man, put that down, can’t you see the sign!?” The Blood’s employee hears this dictate and shrugs his shoulders — my boy plays with the lobsters at Blood’s all the time — and my son ignores the fellow (he’s good at that); nonetheless, the guy repeats his imprecation even more forcefully.

Outside the store, my boy tells me of the incident, and points out the man to me as he exits the store. I approach the fellow, introduce myself, and politely ask how it is that he feels justified in instructing my child in proper behavior, when I am right there and when the responsible store employee also saw no harm in what the kid was doing.

“It takes a village!” was the tight response.

Now I have no problem with someone alerting me to a danger facing my children, but to countermand directly in front of me my decision to allow my kids to do something seems way out of line. Don’t you agree? I guess that this risk-adverse busybody felt that I was behaving irresponsibly in letting the kids handle the lobsters, and prudence required him to step in and save the day. Sheesh!

But perhaps this is the way that the world is going? Given that we will all soon be paying for each other’s health care in one convoluted way or another, then perhaps we have the right, or even the obligation, to make sure that nobody runs risks that could hurt us all in the healthcare pocketbook.

Let’s peer down the slippery slope: a guy like this will want to protect my kids from the grasping lobsters (their claws were banded, by the way — the lobsters, I mean); he’ll protect us from eating the wrong foods; he’ll push us to eat what he deems the right ones. In short, he’ll go a long way towards running/ruining other people’s lives. There is already a nascent term for this: Health Advocacy. It means that I get to put pressure on you (or you on me) — or the government on all of us — to behave according to someone else’s dictates of what is healthy.

If that is what Hillary Clinton, and my son’s pesky tank-side interlocutor, mean by “It takes a village,” well, I prefer to raise my kids as I see fit, thank you. Within reason, this seems to be an essential social freedom.