Make Your Children Eat Dirt

This morning I found an interesting Google advert in my Gmail.  Smorstix.  What is a Smorstix you ask?  Well this handy little item will help you roast your marshamallows when you are gathered ’round the campfire.  As I like a good S’more, I went to their website to see what fabulous new invention they have come up with to help me enjoy this ooey gooey goodness.  Would you believe it – they’ve invented a stick!  Hot damn, who would have thunk it.  As they proudly proclaim  it is"Made of 100% untreated white birch without any additives, dirt or grime"  and for $29 I can have a dozen clean sticks of my own.  What a deal!  Or I could just dust off a stick I find around the campsite and make my S’mores they way generations have.

I am growing increasingly tired of the American urge to sanitize our lives, and in particular our children.  We sanitize what we say and what we believe to meet the current politically correct guidelines.  Our language is constantly evolving so as not to offend anyone from any group, race, religion, handicap handicapable, gender, orientation, nationality, or economic group.  We’re so busy not saying what we mean and not offending anyone that we never really wind up saying anything at all.  My sister used to pay her children a  quarter every time she swore to encourage them not to swear.  The first time I said "Fuck" in front of one of them and they told me I owed them money, I told the child that she could kindly mind fucking right off, and that if she was going to live in the real world, she was going to have learn the language and charged her $1 for the lesson.

To keep our children safe we buy hand sanitizer by the gallon and most of our soaps are antibacterial. You can now buy ultraviolet toothbrush sanitizers and  Clorox proudly promotes that their  disenfecting wipes will clean all the toys your child touches at school. Our tissues are anti-viral, our vaccuum cleaners have HEPA filters, and our laundry detergents sanitize the color and softness right out of our clothes.  Howard Hughes was exposed to more germs in his sterile world than the average American child today.

I hypothesize, and I’m not alone,  that most children around the age of 5 have compromised immune systems, which explains why they always have runny noses and seem to allergic to every foodstuff we heartier dirt eating adults grew up on.  Asthma rates in this country have skyrocketed in the last 20 years, and by some accounts the number of people with asthma jumped 75% between 1980 and 1994. 

Courtesy of the hippies and pundits like Jenny McCarthy, thousands of children go without vaccinations each year for fear their children are going to get autism amongst other dire conditions.  Combined with not being exposed to a decent level of bacteria to build up their immune systems I believe we’re gonna be looking forward to another round of fun diseases like polio in the next 20 years.  I’m gonna start investing in companies that make iron lungs so I can, at least, profit off this paranoia.

So, please, as you take your children camping this fine Memorial Day Weekend, let them gather their sticks for S’mores from the ground and let them eat a little dirt.