Honolulu Lite
Honolulu Lite
Our children have
become beasts of burdenWhen I was younger, so much younger, than today (as the Beatles sang) kids in Hawaii carried their books to school in dorky-looking Pan Am bags. They were squarish plastic things (the bags) with long straps and a Pan Am logo the size of a basketball on the side.
You don't see too many airline-related school accessories anymore. But then again, you don't see many airlines anymore. Who would have thought, a friend of mine pointed out, that Pan Am bags would have outlasted Pan Am World Airways?
Today, schoolkids, who are on the road, with a heavy load (as Crosby, Stills and Nash sang) carry their stuff in backpacks the size of oil drums. They do this because, as Crosby, Stills and Nash pointed out, we want to "teach our children well" and that teaching involves a lot of books and other academic impedimenta that necessarily needs to be lugged to and from school.
I'll be honest with you. The only reason I carried a Pan Am bag was to fool my parents into thinking I was something like a practicing student. Actually, what I had inside the geek luggage were surf trunks and a towel just in case one of my buddies managed to borrow his parents' car and we could cut out of school and go to the beach.
I don't think I ever carried an actual book to or from Aiea High and I'm relatively sure my college grades abstract would back that up.
But kids today aren't as laissez faire, which is to say, stupid, about education. They have tons of homework supported by tons of books that are hauled around in enormous backpacks. Getting off the bus, they look like herds of little Edmund and Edwena Hillarys preparing to scale Mount Scholastic.
HOW CAN THEIR little backs support such large loads? Doctors have worried that they can't. Some kids have suffered back muscle injuries that until now were found only in overweight golfing accountants. On the other hand, deadlifting backpacks all day has given other children calves and biceps the size of tree trunks.
One day while my daughter was parking the forklift she uses to transport her backpack into the house, I snuck a look inside. Here's what it contained: 12 books, four binders, pencil case, laptop computer, CD player, woofer speakers, three changes of clothes, four bottles of water, a human jawbone from the Australopithecus age, Jimmy Hoffa's wallet, ropes, crampons and a Sherpa-English dictionary.
A recent medical study has shown that kids are injured from elephantine backpacks. But not from carrying them, from tripping over them. Nearly 5,000 backpack injuries were due to falling over the damn things. Apparently so many backpacks are lying around school campuses that the main course of study for our children is now pratfalls. It's scary to think we are raising a generation of highly educated Chevy Chases.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com