When you get right down to it, I’m pretty hard core. I’m the kind of outlaw Johnny Cash wrote songs about and mothers across the land feared might one day date their daughters.

I’m bad, folks. Bad to the bone.

I used to walk to school.

In elementary school, it was Brookside, to which I had to travel a length of Columbia Road before climbing a sharp hill and crossing a brook. A brook! These days, the state would demand a kid wear water wings, if they let him walk such a dangerous course at all.

In junior high, it was a long haul, down May Street, the full length of Ticonic and then onto the railroad tracks, which could save an enterprising lad like myself half a mile of walking. Once off the tracks, it was over the Messalonskee Stream, through the Waterville High parking lot and across a football field, where God knew what terrors might await under the bleachers.

In high school (I wasn’t ambitious enough to have a car the first couple of years) it was back to the railroad tracks where we would sometimes loiter to smoke cigarettes and chat with the homeless people who camped there. Nice folk. Some of the best education I got during high school came from things those grungy dudes told me about the world.

I didn’t like buses much, so I walked. And when I announced my plan to hoof it, you know what the adults of the time said to me? They said: “So, walk then. What, do you want a medal?”

Teachers never pulled me aside to ask about my safety and well-being. Police never stopped me on the street to ask just what the hell I thought I was doing. Nobody cared a fig that my friends and I walked to school as long as we got there on time and didn’t pause to bust windows along the way.

Walking to school? A nonissue back when the world was sane. We walked in rain and snow and wind and cold. These days, if a kid were to make that choice, it would require three representatives from Child Protective Services, four School Committee meetings and a new ordinance or three to get to the root of the problem.

Plus counseling, of course, because, you know. A kid who wants to go off without an adult is clearly a deviant.

The Nanny State opposition to kids walking anywhere is apparent all over the place. It’s apparent in the way the school buses stop at every single block so that a child won’t have to take more than a few steps to his front door.

It’s apparent in the way a Maryland couple has been in heaps of trouble since deciding — in a mature and measured way, it turns out — that their kids, ages 10 and 6, were responsible enough to walk home together from a playground.

In the way the South Carolina mother was arrested for letting her 9-year-old daughter play in the park while mom was at work. In the way the Florida mom was hauled off to jail for letting her 7-year-old hike to the park by herself.

It’s a Nanny State, all right, and getting nannier by the minute. Our heroic government leaders don’t think you’re responsible enough to drive your own car without a seat belt, air bags and a reverse camera. Do you think they’re going to trust you to raise your kid the way you want?

Several people, including grizzled old guys who used to fight bears on their walk to school, sent me a link to a story out of the town of Norway where training is underway to teach kids how to walk from one place to another. These grizzled old guys make snorts and hisses of derision as they talk about it.

“Roughly 120 of the approximately 475 students at Rowe Elementary School may become part of a pilot Walking School Bus program in April. The program is a national model that was developed to allow children to regularly walk safely to school with trained supervision.”

With trained supervision. Always. ALWAYS!

It’s nice that they’re doing this; it really is. The exclusive concern of school officials, presumably, is the safety and well-being of the kids, and it’s hard to knock that.

But what is the lesson for the kids in question? “You can grow up to be anything you want to be, Little Jeremiah, as long as you have ample adult supervision along the way.”

Kids are taught that the world is so fraught with danger, they must never dare to walk more than half a block from the school bus steps to the safety of their homes. That the massive, matronly government is all-knowing: Mother Government knows WAY more than lowly parents, who shouldn’t be trusted to make their own decisions. That if all kids (and parents) do what they’re told, when they’re told, they will avoid the risks that the cruel world offers. They will also avoid ever establishing any sense of independence. But that, my friends, is the price of safety.

The ever-encroaching Nanny State is shaping young minds, all right. What I’d like you to ask yourselves, whether you’re a parent, a teacher or just some guy who hangs out along the railroad tracks, is whether the interest of the increasingly intrusive government is about safety or about control, like so many other things. After all, if you teach a kid to submit to the leash in his earliest years, imagine how compliant he or she will be as an adult.

Food for thought on your long drive to work. Remember to buckle up, young man. Nanny demands it.

Mark LaFlamme is a Sun Journal staff writer. This column is what happens when he’s left unsupervised. Email him at mlaflamme@sunjournal.com.

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