On our last day in Zurich we walked along the Limmat River and we watched as hundreds, if not thousands, of young men and women thoroughly enjoyed the river, They were swimming, floating, and even jumping off bridges into the river.
As an American, I was taken aback. Where are your parents? Is this even legal? Well as it turns out, not only is it legal, but the City of Zurich actually owns a platform with diving boards from which people jump into the river. In spite of this, I saw no lifeguards, no police, no safety measures of any kind. The water was definitely deep enough to drown in, but there didn’t appear to be any precautions whatsoever.
I thought maybe this is some kind of aberration, until just 2 days later we found ourselves in the English Garden in Munich. I wanted to see the surfers that I had seen on YouTube who surf in the rapids of Eisbach. I was not surprised to see the surfers on a day where the temperature was over 90 degrees, but what did surprise me was the hundreds of teens and young adults floating down the superfast current of the Eisbach.
It looked like so much fun, that I had to try it myself. I stripped down to just my shorts and gave my stuff to my daughter and jumped in. Guys, this isn’t safe. I’m not a great swimmer and this current is strong. It grabbed ahold of me and pulled me down the river much faster than I had expected. I honestly struggled to float and there were a couple of times where I caught some water in my mouth while struggling to stay above water. Once I had gone about a quarter mile, there was a rope to grab and you could shimmy your way to a ladder to get out. If I had missed the rope I would have floated into a second set of rapids where other surfers are catching “waves”.
After I was done floating, we walked around the park some more and came across the beer garden where we grabbed a couple of take away beers and continued to walk through the park. There were thousands of teenagers and young adults walking around the park laughing, playing, swimming, sunbathing, and some were even drinking.
What did I not notice? Police, fighting, lifeguards, drunken disorderly conduct, or even bullying. I didn’t even see litter. Hell, I even saw empty beer bottles on top of the trash containers because they didn’t want to throw them away, and they knew someone would come by to collect the bottles for recycling.
And how did these thousands of teenagers arrive at the park? They walked, rode their bikes or took public transportation. Like really, parents are letting their kids ride on public transportation by themselves? <gasp> Oh, the horror!
Nothing I mentioned here could happen in the United States. The first time someone got hurt in the river, we would have police patrolling the river and arresting people by the dozens. Selling beer in the park is absolutely out of the question and walking around a park with an open beer? Are you nuts? And the drinking age is 16, you heard me – 16! Can you imagine a 16 year old legally drinking in a park? It’s a recipe for disaster, right?
But where was all the fighting, the lewd behavior, surely at least one ambulance was called? Isn’t there broken glass strewn around the paths in the park? Nope, there wasn’t, just a bunch of mostly unsupervised kids having fun.
We always talk about America being a land of freedom. However, we always frame those freedoms in terms of our First and Second Amendment rights. Does that really make us free? In America, I have more of a right to carry a gun down the street than a beer. That just doesn’t make sense. And could you even imagine the hellstorm that would await anyone who proposed lowering the drinking age to 16? Also, what age would you allow your kid to ride the New York City subway alone? At what age would you allow a kid to go to a park with friends, unsupervised?
Many of our freedoms are restricted by laws and ordinances and others are self-imposed. A kid could easily be taught how to take public transportation by 10 years old but would anyone let them? I mean, it’s legal but, c’mon, in America? Would you let your teenager swim in a river with a strong current and no lifeguards? We definitely wouldn’t allow our children to jump into a river off a bridge and if we knew that was happening somewhere, we wouldn’t allow them to go.
We have locked our children in a jail of safety, attempting to prevent even the slightest accidents, but are they safer? We have ridiculously high traffic fatalities as well as off the charts gun deaths. We litigate every accident that causes bodily harm or death and it’s absolutely paralyzing us. We’ve built ourselves a nanny state and I pray for the sake of our kids we can unravel some of this. Its not just physical danger either. Any time that someone even does something in front of a child that a parent doesn’t agree with, whether it be a public prayer, teaching Critical Race Theory, or God forbid seeing a drag queen, we demand that it stop immediately. Our kids aren’t going to explode by seeing something different, by experiencing something different or by just being allowed to have some real, actual, unscheduled spontaneous fun. We need to start allowing our kids to be kids again. <End of rant>
Newby to Expert Traveler 