By Gordon Barlow

Linda and her young
sister learnt to swim in the hands of a middle-aged man who knew
their mother, though not particularly well. He had no qualifications,
no insurance, no supervision, and (on the evidence) no evil desires.
It never occurred to anybody that he might let his hands roam where
they shouldn’t roam – and one assumes it never occurred to him
either. Those were the days, eh?

She and her friends
rode or walked to school and back unmolested, and played in parks
afterwards, and crossed roads and tramlines, and skipped safely
through dark underpasses. No mobile phones to tell their mums where
they were, no wrist-watches to tell the time, even; bikes were never
stolen from where they’d been dropped on the ground.

(In the Exeter City
public swimming baths a few years ago I was ticked off for taking
photos of my granddaughters while they swam with their grandma. I was
probably lucky not to have my name put on the sex-offenders
Register!)

Out in the bush, my
young brother and I rode our bikes home after school – in a convoy
up the dirt road, peeling off one by one at the tracks to our
respective homes, half a mile or more in from the road. During the
rains, horses took the place of bikes on what was then a mud
road.

Some days, I would
go home with the Cameron kids, and Mrs Cameron would phone Mum to
negotiate a departure time. On hot days, we’d all pile into their
swimming hole. I don’t think any of us could swim, but we could
stay afloat; the nearest adult was up at the house two hundred yards
away.

Except for the time
Bryan broke his arm galloping through the scrub, nothing bad ever
happened to us. Frankie once accidentally rode his bike over the tail
of a brown-snake: that could have been nasty – but he was lucky, so
we didn’t even bother to tell the parents.

Back then, we were
allowed to look after ourselves – Linda in her seaside town, me in
the bush. So was our son on this island, a generation later. (He
learned the hard way, how to avoid the pain of maidenplum.) So too
are his children in their semi-rural Scandinavian setting. We have
all learned to calculate the risk of any activity, and to act
accordingly.

When Linda and I
backpacked through the Middle East in our mid-20s, our mothers took
comfort (well, some comfort…) in the knowledge that we
probably could look after ourselves.

Surely, far too many
middle-class children today are coddled – by parents,
neighbourhoods, towns, provinces and nations. In much of the Western
world, toddlers whose parents leave them in cars for more than ten
seconds run the risk of being abducted by social-services
bureaucrats. Parents are publicly scolded for letting their kids find
their own way home from schools and playgrounds. Indeed, for even
letting them be at playgrounds without adult supervision.
What’s next: certificates from City Hall for play-dates?

All parents know
that at some stage children have to be capable of crossing
streets without having their hands held. At some point car-drivers
have to be trusted not to run them down, and ice-cream vendors not to
rape them, and teachers not to turn comforting hugs into rabid
molestation.

Sooner or later –
children have to be trusted to look after themselves. Society just
hasn’t got the resources to look after everybody. Already,
“society” is looking after far more people than it ought to be –
far more babies, far more children, far more incompetent adults, far
more old folk.

Here in Cayman, half
of all Civil Servants, half of all private-sector personnel-staff,
and half of our Public Revenues, are assigned to protecting Caymanian
citizens who aren’t even encouraged to look after
themselves. Civil Servants and politicians all have a vested interest
in maintaining the status quo.

Like most other communities in the Western World, we are in danger of ending up with everybody being protected all of the time, by armies of bureaucrats whose wages are paid out of money borrowed against the taxes of future generations. In the end, everybody will have forgotten how to look after themselves.

Gordon Barlow

Gordon Barlow has lived in Cayman since 1978. He was the first full-time Manager of the Cayman Islands Chamber of Commerce (1986-1988)- a turbulent period as the Chamber struggled to establish its political independence. He has publicly commented on social and political issues since 1990, and in 1998 served as the secretary of two committees of the 'Vision 2008' exercise. He has represented the Chamber at several overseas conferences, and the Cayman Islands Human Rights Committee at an international symposium in Gibraltar in 2004.

You can view all his blogs at: https://barlowscayman.blogspot.com