Tell the children the world is their oyster

Meghan Cox Gurdon: Tell the children the world is their oyster - Examiner.com

They ought to be encouraged to look about the world with dash and optimism, not apologetic guilt for the footprint they’re leaving behind.

There’s something horribly cringing in the fashion of minimizing one’s effect on the world. By all means, we can conserve energy, but must we inflict our eco-alarmism on children quite so wantonly? Suicide is the quickest way to reduce your effect on the environment, as someone said. That’s hardly a helpful message for the kiddies.

We have friends in Canada who are so intent upon leaving only mouselike traces behind that they have confined themselves voluntarily to a single square mile.

This might sound charming: Two people sacrificing whatever swagger and swashbuckle they might have enjoyed, so as to compensate the cosmos for the rest of us stinking parasites.

Yet isn’t it awful, that centuries of human achievement should produce such guilt? The square-milers make me think of a cartoon vacuum cleaner that eventually sucks itself up its own tube and vanishes with a little “pop.”