We are pleased to announce a new member of The Moderate Voice’s highly-exclusive “Get A Life Club.”
Inductees awarded these highly-coveted seats must show by their statements or actions an obsessively or hilarious dedication to political correctness or stunning nitpickiness. The latest person to receive a seat in this club is being awarded a lifetime membership and a sofa instead of a seat due to her jaw-dropping pronouncement and decision on a generations-old childhood game.
From The Daily Mail in Great Britain:
In an age when childhood innocence is under threat from every direction, the traditional game of tag would seem an unlikely offender.
But headmistress Susan Tuck doesn’t think so. She has banned it – along with all other games which involve physical contact – as “inappropriate behaviour”.
Youngsters aged five to 11 at Bracebridge Heath Primary School near Lincoln have been told there will be no kiss-chase, and even linking arms with each other will not be allowed.
The only time any of the 400 pupils can touch each other is if they need to help a classmate who has fallen over.
How about readers who have fallen over by this decision on tag? Can Mrs. Tuck join a club or something to burn up this energy? MORE:
Mrs Tuck became concerned that playground games were becoming too rough after a number of instances of bumped heads.
And perhaps she’s right. Just think of all the news stories and statistics on little kids who have been injured or traumatized playing tag all these years. MORE:
She said the next move would be slowly to reintroduce “supervised and appropriate physical contact between pupils”.
“A minority of pupils persistently offended on the playground,” she said. “That needed to be dealt with.
“I told the children we should start by having no physical contact to start this on a level playing field.
“I couldn’t say to the boys that they couldn’t play certain games and then allow the girls to go around linking arms.
“I think on the first day the children thought ‘how is this going to work?’ Now I have spoken to some of them and they think the playground has become a lot calmer.
“Pupils are more creative, playing games like shadow tag to replace the real thing. Rather than shoving each other roughly on the back you try to jump on their shadow.”
Ah ha! So now they can tag shadows. Who ever would have thought of that game?
For this outstanding display of shadow-intelligence, shadow-logic and shadow-appreciation of game that has probably been played by kids since the days of Cain and Abel (well, perhaps she has a point — look what happened to one of THOSE boys), TMV happily admits Ms. Tuck to TMV’s Get A Life Club.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.