Letters: Restrictions are holding us back

DANI Garavelli ("Reasons to be cheerful", 24 October) asks whether our lives are not vastly superior to those of our great-grandparents; surely an unrealistic comparison. A more relevant timescale would have been since the Fifties, when many of us were youngsters.

In terms of health and material possessions the answer would still be a resounding Yes, but in my youth divorce and debt were rare, and paedophilia unheard of. Asbos would never have been needed.

We had none of the fear which now rules our lives; as children we went off for hours on our own, including in darkness. Much of our learning came from personal discovery, including making our own playthings. We had open spaces and woodland to explore; now it's all roads and buildings. Nowadays adults and children fear contact with each other.

We learned to fend for ourselves; now people expect others to take care of their needs, a prime example being 16-year-old unmarried mothers being given priority housing. Personal control and responsibility have become alien concepts, and life is characterised by restrictions.

Add in outrageous health and safety barriers and the evil of political correctness and you have a perfect recipe for stunted development of both individual and society.

Robert Dow, Tranent

IT WAS welcome to hear someone trying to cheer us up in the midst of the doom and gloom pervading most newspapers, but Dani Garavelli's blizzard of statistics wasn't quite what the doctor ordered.

To tell us how much longer we live these days and how much better our health is will not help us forget the retrenchments ahead. It's precisely because we're living so long, partly thanks to the spiralling costs of a National Health Service and universal pension provision that the public spending cuts ahead are going to be so painful.

And it's also because we're so long-lived that so many of us see how little the astonishing rise in overall affluence has added to the sum of human happiness.

bfarquhar, via e-mail