The media is making my mom paranoid!

When I told my mother that her youngest granddaughter was going on a seven-day backcountry backpacking trip with seven random strange girls and two women from the YMCA, she positively freaked out.

"Oh, my god, you can't just send her out like that. You don't know any of those people. We hear all kinds of things about how molestors join those groups to be close to kids. Nothing like that ever happened to you, did it?" I assured her that it hadn't. "But, we never heard anything like that when you were young."

I assured her that it was going on all the time, even then. I'm pretty sure pedophiles of the 1970s were just as familiar with target-rich environments as those of the 2010s. Despite it all, most of the world succeeded in growing up and living through the fire that is adolescence, and most of us blessedly had other tragedies to worry about. Not to diminsh what the victims went through; it's just that most of us were much more likely to deal with come-ons from our peers than from creepy adults.

As it turned out, Kouryou-chan didn't go. She came down with a nasty case of bronchitis two days before she was scheduled to leave. She's still coughing today, but it's mostly abated. She's on a regimen of ibprophen to keep the irritation in her lungs down, and antibiotics because it's a bacterial infection. She has a credit from the YMCA to go next year, though, and both Omaha and I would like to see that happen. It looked like so much fun, Omaha and I wanted to go with them.

Still, I'm not happy with the way my mom's beliefs about the world have ossified into a general paranoia that things are getting worse.