Clarification Regarding Kids' Safety and Fear

Someone responded a bit wildly in a recent post when I was trying to merely urge caution when posting personal details in the strongest possible terms. Hot-button concepts were mentioned -- racism, rape and homophobia -- and I suppose that the commenter wanted to stress that we shouldn't have to live in fear even though, he later admits, we do anyway. ("When I was a child, my parents let me play in the front yard, ride my bike across town, walk home from school alone... now, I'd be a fool to allow my kids to do that...")

I'll restate and reiterate: the new version of blogger has a "By Invitation Only" security feature. Use it. You can invite as many people to have access as you want to via email. Just like you can give out keys to your deadbolt locks to anyone you trust.

I don't let fear "govern my every move." I'm very much against what Dennis Prager refers to as the "stranger danger" programs that infected schools in the silly seventies. I'm not going to teach my kids to beware so-called strangers in general; it's counter-productive at best. But the world wide web is the Wild West at best and a wild wasteland at worst.