This is too damn much!

Okay, so I found an article in the New York Times that enrages me.

PARENTHETICAL RIGHT-WING NUTCASE THOUGHT: Hardly a day goes by when that rag doesn't infuriate me. I don't know how I missed this one -- it appeared five days ago -- but to me it shows how destructive the "it takes a village" mentality has become.

This particular story, which appeared under the headline New York Tries to Think Outside the Sandbox, lays out plans the liberal loons have for turning children into overweight, neurotic twerps, snotty little future NY Times subscribers who sit around doing nothing but looking down their noses at the dirty, healthy kids from other places. Just as their parents do.

Excerpts from the story about the way NYC is planning to reinvent playgrounds to make them safe and socially acceptable follow:

New York City, with its rich history of public playgrounds, is on the verge of a bold experiment in the way children play, one that could accelerate the trend away from monkey bars, swings and seesaws used by generations of city children.

And what will these marvelous "play areas" have? a playground near the South Street Seaport...will have trained “play workers” on hand to help children interact with features of the new playground: water, ramps, sand and specially designed objects meant to spur the imagination.

Ooh, ooh! "Play workers!" "Interaction!"

But wait, there's more! Based on child-development theories that children need to engage in social and fantasy play rather than just build physical skills, the project was conceived and is being designed at no charge by David Rockwell, famous for creating adult play spaces like the restaurants Nobu and Café Gray and the Mohegan Sun casino and resort. Yup, those are "adult play spaces," all right....

These wacko adults have ideas that certainly don't square with either my memories of childhood or current beliefs: behaviorists and others say planners could go even further to reflect more refined ideas about nurturing children... They also envision groups of children collaborating, for instance, loading containers with sand, hoisting them up with pulleys and then lowering them down to wagons waiting to be wheeled off to another part of the park.

Cripes. I guess they'd wet their pants if confronted with kids "collaborating" to play the kinds of games we played. You know, stuff where one of us might get a cut or a bruise or, worse, get some exercise. We didn't want "nurturing;" we wanted to have some rough-and-tumble fun.

But the planners and social wankers -- excuse me, "scientists" -- of New York City have it all figured out: “We’re creating as many opportunities as we can for collaborative play — thinking of imagination as important a muscle as running,” Mr. Rockwell said, as well as places that children can be in and manipulate as they wish, with the loose objects encouraging them “to understand that they can control their own environment.”

I have news for you jerks. Kids don't give a shit about "controlling their own environment." They want to play.

I don't know why the city doesn't just give each kid a freekin' computer game and sit 'em down in a corner somewhere.

If I had kids and lived in a town that encouraged idiocy like this, we'd be out of there on the next thing moving in any direction.

In the meantime, everyone involved with this, from Mayor Bloomberg to the would-be "play workers," should be barred by law from ever making any decisions involving children.