So, I was with my kids at our annual Thunder Over Louisville outing, camping on the top of a parking garage with hundreds of other families, watching the festivities. And, I had a visitor.

Lots of visitors, actually. Little ones.

Little dirty-faced kids that looked like they’d been hugging tires from all the black filth on them. Some had shoes, some even had clean shirts. But, each of those visitors had one thing in common. Their parents were nowhere to be seen.

Some have called me over-protective of my own children. I have this silly habit of never letting my kids out of my sight when we leave the boundaries of our home. I watch them carefully and hover in the background in case something were to happen. They are girls, ages 3 and 9.

I remember when I was a kid, my mother would shove me out the door with a bottle opener and a carton of 16 oz. coke bottles. Then, she’d lock me outside and return to her bed to sleep off another hangover from whatever debauchery she had been involved in the night before. Ah, those were the days. Those hot summers with nothing to do but watch my cokes get warm in the sun, all the while thinking about my marvelous toys and air conditioning inside. And of course, my better parent, TV — beckoning me with it’s four channels of VHF/UHF goodness. Good times, good times.

I’ll admit, I didn’t get abducted by strangers when I was a neglected child. I didn’t ingest any poison or try my hand at rattlesnake wrasslin.’ I didn’t resort to criminal mischief either. It was a pretty dull summer life I led — me, my bottle opener and my cokes.

But times have changed.

Where once you could let/make your kids play outside all day, unsupervised, our modern world is a tad different. For one, there’s the wild animals. Honest-to-goodness animals. Cougars, Mountain Lions, and other varmints are actually making a comeback in many States after years of libtarded, treehuggy over-"conservation." Sadly, I wonder how many missing kids actually were meals for wildlife returning to live alongside man once more.

Just because it’s the twenty-first century doesn’t mean your child can’t be plucked from a riverbank by a crocodile or swallowed by some huge snake. I know, no predators like that in the U.S., but there are predators.

There’s the animals in our neighborhoods; the perverts, pornographers and pedophiles that dream unspeakable dreams and do unthinkable things, and they are in your neighborhood. You may not have to worry about mountain lions, but try checking out your own neighborhood on a national sex offender website. If you dare.

My point is that children don’t pop out of the womb with a voter registration card in one hand and a union card in the other, ready to trundle off to work. They aren’t like cattle, ready to fend for themselves. They actually require a good many years before they are able to fend for themselves. It’s during these years that children need to be fed, nurtured and yes, protected.

Letting your child roam free at an event full of hundreds of strangers, broad daylight or not, is not good parenting.

It’s also quite rude.

Here I am, feeding my kids snacks that I was smart enough ahead of time to bring along. Or watching them color with chalk I packed for the trip, knowing there would be this big expanse of concrete for them to draw on. And, your rugrat wanders over, looking for some attention. Like the undead, they stare at me. Are they licking their lips because they smell br-ains? Or because they haven’t been fed for hours? Should I not tell them to put my kids’ toys down before they wander off with them?

Keep your kids to yourself, please. You don’t know me. You don’t know any of the strangers that show up for Thunder Over Louisville. "Stranger" used to mean something. We used to tell children to avoid strangers. Now too many of you are letting strangers play babysitter.

Slackers. That’s what you are.

You sit their cackling with your friends, drinking your booze or rotting your lungs with cancer sticks, while your kids run rampant. Sheep get more attention than your kids do. Do you really think of an Air Show and fireworks as adult entertainment? Did you come for you or them? Is your child that much of an inconvenience? I guess you couldn’t afford a babysitter, because that might cut into your beer money.

If you don't want your kids, put them up for adoption. They'd have a better chance in a foster home or orphanage. At least there, they get to stay inside and someone watches over them.