Can't believe
you made it!
Can't believe you made it if you lived as a child in the 50's, 60's
or 70's.
Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long
as we have...
As children,
- we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
- Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always
a special
treat.
- We even got spanked.
- Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored
lead-based paint.
- We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors,
or cabinets,
- and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention
hitchhiking to town as a young kid!)
- We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.
Horrors!
- We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and
then rode
down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.
- After running into
the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.
- We would leave
home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the
streetlights came on.
- No one was able to reach us all day.
- No cell phones.
- Unthinkable!
- We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.
- We
got cut and broke bones and broke teeth,and there were no law suits
from
these accidents.
- They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us. Remember
accidents?
- We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue
and learned to get over it.
- We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank
sugar soda but we were never overweight ... we were always outside
playing.
- We shared one grape soda with four friends,
from one bottle and
no one died from this.
- We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X Boxes,
video games at all, 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround
sound,
personal cell phones, personal computers, internet chat rooms...we had
friends.
- We went outside and found them.
- We rode bikes or walked to a friend's
home and knocked on the door, or rung the bell or just walked in and
talked
to them. Imagine such a thing. Without asking a parent! By ourselves!
Out
there in the cold cruel world! Without a guardian. How did we do it?
- We
made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms and although
we
were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did
the
worms live inside us forever.
- Little League had tryouts and not everyone made
the team. Those
who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.
- Some students weren't
as smart as others so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat
the same grade...Horrors! Tests were not adjusted for any reason.
- Our actions were our own.
-
- Consequences were expected.
- No one to
hide behind.
- The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was
unheard of.
- They actually sided with the law, imagine that!
- This generation
has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and
inventors,
ever.
- The past 50 years has been an explosion of
innovation and new ideas.
- We had freedom,
- failure,
- success and responsibility,
- and we learned
how to deal with it all.
- And you're one of them. Congratulations!
Please pass this on to others who have had the luck to grow up as
kids,
before lawyers and government
regulated our lives, for our "own good."
Looking back, it's hard to
believe that
we have lived as long as we have
My Mom used to cut chicken, chop
eggs and spread mayo on the same
cutting
board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem
to get food poisoning.
My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat
it raw
sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
We had no childproof lids on
medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets,
and when we
rode our bikes we had no helmets.
We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and
robbers,
and
used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB
gun was not available.
Some students weren't as smart as
others or didn't work hard so
they failed a grade
and were held back to repeat the same grade.
That generation produced some of the
greatest risk-takers and problem
solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success
and responsibility,
and we learned how to deal with it all.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead
of a pristine
pool (talk about boring), the term cell phone would
have conjured up a phone in a jail
cell, and a pager was the school
PA system.
We all took gym, not PE . . . and risked permanent injury with a
pair of high top
Ked's (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training
athletic shoes with air
cushion soles and built in light
reflectors. I
can't recall any injuries but they must
have happened because they tell
us how much safer we are now. Flunking gym
was not an option. . .even
for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than
gym
.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running
in the halls with
leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the
wet spot. How much better off would we
be today if we only knew we
could have sued the school system.
Speaking of school, we all said
prayers and the pledge and stayed
in detention
after school and caught all sorts of negative attention
for the next two weeks.
We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion
or condoms
(we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they
did give us a couple
of aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting
the sniffles. What an archaic
health system we had then. Remember
school nurses? Ours wore a hat and
everything.
I thought that I was supposed to
accomplish something before I was
allowed to
be proud of myself.
I just can't recall how bored we
were without computers, PlayStation,
Nintendo,
X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that
memory as I try to
rationalize through the denial of the dangers could
have befallen us as we
trekked off each day about a mile down the road
to some guy's vacant lot, built
forts out of branches and pieces
of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got
to be the Lone Ranger.
What was that property owner
thinking, letting us play on that lot?
He should have
been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property,
complete with a
self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm.
Oh yeah . . . and where was the
Benadryl and sterilization kit when
I got that bee sting?
I could have been killed!
We played king of the hill on piles
of gravel left on vacant
construction sites and
when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48 cent
bottle of Mercurochrome and then
we got our butt spanked. Now it's a trip
to the emergency room, followed by a
10-day dose of a $49 bottle of
antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue
the contractor for
leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either because if we did,
we got our butt
spanked (physical abuse) . . . and then we got our
butt spanked again when we got home.
Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked
down the dust
from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks
(remember why Tonka
trucks were made tough . . . it wasn't so that they
could take the rough Berber in th
family room), and Dad drove a car with
leaded gas.
Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am
sure that I nearly
exhausted my imagination a couple of times when
we went on two week vacations.
I should probably sue the folks now
for the danger they put us in when we all slept
in campgrounds in
the family tent.
Summers were spent behind the push
lawnmower and I didn't even know
that mowers
came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without
an automatic blade-stop or an
auto-drive. How sick were my parents?
Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. I recall Donny
Reynolds
from next
door coming over and doing his tricks on the front stoop just
before he fell off. Little
did his Mom know that she could have owned our
house. Instead she picked him up and
swatted him for being such a goof.
It was a neighborhood run amuck.
To top it off, not a single person
I knew had ever been told that
they were from a
dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have
known that we needed to get
into group therapy and anger management
classes? We were obviously so duped
by so many societal ills, that
we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't
taking Prozac!
How did we survive?