Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell made news earlier this week when he said (I'm paraphrasing) that we Americans are turning into a bunch of wusses.  His remark came after the NFL postponed Sunday's NFL game between the Eagles and Vikings in Philadelphia due to the snow storm that was blowing through the city that day.  The NFL hadn't taken an action like that since the 1930s and Rendell saw it as a sign that we're getting soft.

I'm beginning to think he might be right. Why do I say that?  Because of stories like this one where a stellar student in Sanford, NC was suspended for the remainder of her senior year because she had a paring knife in her lunch.  Even if you don't buy her dad's story that the lunch was his and she'd accidentally picked it up, what does it say about us that we'd suspend a kid who's never been in trouble before for over half of a school year because she had a paring knife in her lunch? She never took it out, much less threaten anyone with it, so how do you suspend a kid for that amount of time for making what appears to be an honest mistake?

The story reminded me of the time my son, who's now a HS senior himself, had a toy gun in his backpack in kindergarten.  My wife somehow realized that it was probably in his backpack and raced to school to intercept him before he managed to get it into the classroom.  Thankfully the lady in the office had the common sense to look the other way when my wife took the neon colored, bubble shaped gun from my son's backpack and slipped it in her purse.  If she hadn't my son could have been suspended for the year too. That's just craziness.

I know that two stories don't make a trend, but I swear our ancestors would scoff at us if they saw how we lead our increasingly risk-averse lives.  After all they lived during times where children died all too often, antibiotics didn't exist, cars and the horse carriages that preceded them didn't have seat belts, no one wore helmets but most men wore hats, people actually killed their own dinners and, most shockingly, no one had air conditioning.  I fear that if we could travel back in time we'd all be dead in a month.