Dodgeball and The Apocalypse: Response 1.

My father was bullied in high school. Your father was bullied in high school. The gym was a place of torture for those who were not members of the future roiders of America. They all were lined up and pummeled with dodge balls while sadistic Veteran teachers laughed. It will make you tougher, they all said. And they were right. The Internet has created a haven for the overprotective mothers of America. They have moved on making their 14 year-old son's lunch. Instead folding their pristine cargo pants, and shining their white tennis shoes, the mothers now spend time posting on their own personal blogs, or commenting on the most recent New Yorker article. It is these mothers, afraid of their own children's mortality to such an extent that they attempted to encase them in glass, and fill their blood with formaldehyde. The all to successful Internet campaigns have made bullying a federal offense and dodge ball has been thrown from our gyms. Our modern culture, through our modern medias have refused to bruise our children. And so we've never healed. I have never been to the street corner that my father always tells me to go to, to hang out with the imaginary adolescents he tells me are there. The ones he spent hours with, and have grown storied. And it is because the Internet spread every single story of ever child who ever fell and hurt his head without a helmet. And got kidnapped by some faceless pedophile patrolling every neighborhood's playgrounds. The national average of kidnappings has not been raised since the 1930's but the amount of children confined to a house has. We have no connection to the real world, and no knowledge that if we trace the edge of a knife it will cut us. An apocalypse is coming, and John Connor never wore a helmet when he biked up and down the street he wasn't allowed to cross. John Connor played dodge ball.