How did we survive!?
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- frow
"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 that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20 acres, 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 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 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? ! ? ! ? ! ? ! ?"
- MrDinky0
consider your self lucky
more we know, more we want
- frow0
ah, things were so great in those days. (sigh).
- fits0
that was beautiful!
- TransFatty0
interesting question.
once and a while ....
i find myself thinking about how magnificently horrible car accidents were in the 50's, 60's and 70's .... before
certain automotive safety laws were passed.photos of old car wrecks are a genre unto themselves.
- unknown0
no alarms and no suprises
oh for the good ol' days jimbob
- Bluejam0
Arm bands.
The key to every childs safety.
- TransFatty0
nice BlueJam, nice.
- MrDinky0
sniff... i remember my first comp.....
- frow0
Sweet fancy...! That computer looks like something I donated to the Smithsonian!
- mrdobolina0
nice frow, Im going to send that to some non-designer friends.
- drubynum0
I remember going to my cousins house and all my uncles and my dad would be steadily drinking beer and they never hesitated to pile a bunch of us in the oldsmobile to go get ice cream or whatever. I also remember riding horizontal on the back dashboard, or sitting on my dad's lap while he drove, always with beer in hand. Sometimes he'd let me drive. I guess it was dangerous, but only in comparison to now. Looking back it all seemed innocent and fun. Today they'd call that child abuse or reckless endangerment.
- frow0
yep... things have changed indeed.
- Mal0
The only constant is change.
- k0na_an0k0
impressive
- nicedream0
maybe some of us didn't survive and we just didn't know it back then. and now that we are so hooked on the mass medias, we can't help but be aware of all the "dangers" out there.
- j_red0
funny....
bump.
- luke0
1) you should consider writing a book
2) you know whats wrong today - especially in the usa
note´: didn´t mean to offend the US - there´s just a lot of truth in what frown said-
- unfittoprint0
frow, right on the spot.
- skonge0
you just described my child hood
sniff sniff
- redFridge0
its strange how things change...
will my kids fight chaos in the field with a wood sword like i did? i hope so.