Further Expansion of the Nanny State

A Fairfax County (Virginia) elementary school has taken serious measures towards maintaining the safety of the kids in which they are charged with day in and day out. No, it does not have anything to do with gun safety on campus. Don't misunderstand that reference, I'm an advocate of the Second Amendment just like my friend the pirate who recently put one of his guns to good use (nice pic). I think that if somebody on campus had actually had a gun (other than the killer) then there would have been fewer people killed, but I'm drifting off topic. Neither does it have anything whatsoever to do with education, which I thought was sort of the point of school. No, there have been much more dangerous issues arise. According to reports, a principal of one of our elementary schools is taking the socialist bull by the horns and has banned the game of tag. Why? Because it has become a game of "intense aggression". Yes tag, as in tag you're it and then you run away. This is the new threat to 6th graders growing up and going to school in Virginia. Actually, and this is the sad thing, we have become a society that is so hung up on regulating everything (TMF will jump on this bandwagon) that we've lost sight of the realities of life.
Forget for just a second that this article is actually regulating playground activities, and we're not talking about drugs, or anything illegal. Life aint always easy, and when things get difficult we learn what we're made of. It's a little thing called "character", and it is not something that happens over night, character develops over a lifetime. And it's challenges, and experiences that are not always fun, as well as how we respond to them, that forms that character. If every little inconvenience that would be encountered during the formative years is banned, what are kids learning? Sometimes you have to skin a knee, and bruise an elbow in order to learn something about yourself. This is a small piece of the ridiculous puzzle that kids are being socially engineered into accepting as the way things ought to be. At some point though, there is going to have to be a harsh reality for these spoiled little brats. We have to understand that we can't regulate ourselves into utopia. The reach of (over)protectionism can only extend so far, eventually it slips through the fingers, and at that point it's too late to cry about unfairness.