I just read an article suggesting that peanuts should be banned on airplanes. I got two paragraphs in and had to close my Web browser. Stuff like this makes me think that I'm the only rational person left in a universe that has totally gone mad.
Look, I was in elementary and high school on the 1980s, not 30 years ago. I don't remember a single person EVER having an allergic reaction to peanuts. We didn't have segregated lunch tables, or peanut free zones, and not ONE kid dropped dead of a seizure because of it.
There was no ADD back then, either. Or ADHD for that matter. Or anything that would require medicating children. When I was a kid, other kids that behaved that way were punished. Because they were acting up. For attention. Even at the ripe old age of youth I knew that these were kids with problems at home, it was poor parenting, not chemical imbalances. Nothing that couldn't be solved with a little firm parenting, some tough love, some consistency in their home lives.
I hear the argument that psychological illnesses were underdiagnosed until recently, but I'm not buying that entirely either. Especially because it doesn't explain how the human race could have suddenly developed a deathly allergy to a food product that has been consumed for hundreds of years without causing any death.
Yes, some psychological ailments (notice I don't call them illnesses) were misdiagnosed until recently - male depression, for example. But kids weren't dropping dead in droves for no apparent reason before, there's no reason to expect why they would now.
Nuts to that.
