I’ve always had a problem with authority.
Partly because my parents were on the older side when I was born (46!) so by the time I came around and they’d already had 4 kids to wrangle I had a lot of free rein and autonomy.
Partly because I’d noticed things happen that didn’t make sense.
Like when I was in Grade 4 and I’d won the outstanding academic achievement award at my school the year prior but lost the award and $20 cheque to another student in my class who was clearly inferior academically because they didn’t want to give it to a student 2 years in a row.
Or the time in high school I put forth what I thought was an excellent distinction between sport and other forms of physical activity that are not sport related, which I will put forth to you right now to judge:
Sport is a competitive physical activity that requires the athlete to react and adapt to the opposition, whereas a physically active game or competition doesn’t.
So ice hockey and baseball are sports, but golf and figure skating fit into a different category (physically active games/competitions – we need a better name for this).
There are grey areas like running or cycling races, which do require some reaction and adaptability but this is not a core feature of the activity, just a by-product of the way the activity is performed i.e. in a big group that starts at the same time.
But running and cycling races don’t necessarily have to be this way as they could be done one athlete at a time. Ice hockey couldn’t though, neither could baseball.
Anyway when I put forth this idea my kinesiology teacher stared blankly at me for a moment then totally ignored what I’d just said and moved on.
But maybe the big one was my back surgery when I was 13.
The doctors didn’t really sit down and explain that this surgery wasn’t at all necessary, they didn’t give me or my parents any stats or cost/benefit analysis to consider, they just said it was something they could do and I could do it if I wanted.
So I went through with it, suffered through months where simply twisting to wipe my butt was painful and showering stung because the skin was so raw.
Anyway that brings me to a couple of X posts I read one day:
This one was relevant because just yesterday I was talking with a fellow dad of my 8 year old’s hockey team and he was telling me how the goalie on his 10 year old’s team wasn’t able to play in the playoffs for the team because he was out injured with pericarditis (heart inflammation), likely due to the covid vaccine.
A 10 year old out with a heart condition.
Heartbreaking.
Then I saw this post, which didn’t hit as close to home but was much more shocking:
If you want to take care of your health, the days of blind trust in authority are over.
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