A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on reality TV

Re:A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on realit... by throwaway-blaze on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @06:11PM (#31103747)

(Using throwaway, because people can't have rational discussions anymore).

47yr old with 12yr old twins. Live in a million dollar neighborhood in Capitol Hill Seattle. Kids go to private school about a mile south of home. When the school year started, they wanted to walk to and from school alone.

We had to stop this in the last month and accompany them on the walks. My daughter saw multiple fentanyl od's on the street, my son asked me what that guy he saw was doing with the torch under the aluminum foil.

I grew up in the 80s in NYC and took the subway from Queens to Manhattan for HS (Stuyvesant). Plenty of homeless but mostly alcoholics, occasional mentally ill. The havoc from meth, fentanyl, heroin is too much for us to let our kids stay as independent as we want.

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Re:A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on realit... by wolverine876 on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @08:20PM (#31104722)

> I grew up in the 80s in NYC and took the subway from Queens to Manhattan for HS (Stuyvesant). Plenty of homeless but mostly alcoholics, occasional mentally ill.

You didn't see drug users in 1980s NYC? And when did crack show up there?

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Re:A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on realit... by gammarator on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @11:49PM (#31105881)

Yeah, by any objective measure 80s NYC was way more dangerous than Capitol Hill, Seattle is today. The cognitive dissonance here is interesting.

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Re:A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on realit... by com2kid on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @08:51PM (#31104911)

> For another... your 12 year olds can handle seeing homeless people. I promise you.

Did you miss the part where he said people are passed out, possibly dead, on the sidewalk?

I remember going into a Walgreens in Boston and walking out 15 minutes later to a body being put into an ambulance. A few hours later I got on a plane to the UK, made my way to Edinburgh, and was blown away by how clean the city was in comparison to anything I'd seen in the US.

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Re:A 4-year-old can run errands alone and not just on realit... by abrahamepton on Thursday April 21, 2022 @12:57PM (#31112001)

Yeah. I've been on those sidewalks too. "People are passed out, possibly dead" is...hyperbolic. It's a real issue, I grant you, but there's a looot of hyperbole. It's not that bad, except in a few specific corners across an entire city of 700,000 people. So I disagree with the assessment.

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