HOW DID WE LIVE THROUGH IT?


You lived as a child in the 50s, 60s or the 70s.

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 a special treat.

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 dodgeball and the ball would really hurt. We got cut, broke 
bones, and broke teeth, but 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 cellular 
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 that 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!



The Bad Old Days...

Note: If you didn't grow up in the U.S. or maybe Canada, this probably won't 
make much sense. In the U.S., there have been huge changes in the past 20-40
years in terms of what is considered acceptable ways to raise children.

Mom used to cut up 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.

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. 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
staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We
must have had horribly damaged psyches.

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 an 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. (or if you're older
than dirt, your school didn't even have a school nurse)
 
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, Play
Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that
memory as I try to rationalize through denial the dangers that 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) there... and then we got 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 the 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 a 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? Think about it!