In order to participate in the GunBroker Member forums, you must be logged in with your GunBroker.com account. Click the sign-in button at the top right of the forums page to get connected.
The "bad" old days - how did we survive? (C&P)
bambihunter
Member Posts: 10,742 ✭✭✭
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.
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.
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.
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 baby 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 20, 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) here too .... 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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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 baby 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 20, 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) here too .... 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 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?
Fanatic collector of the 10mm auto.
Comments
We weren't all diagnosed with ADD and given narcotics. If my father suspected "ADD" the only medication I got was a size 13 up my a**! An effective cure and not habit forming!
Mateomasfeo
"I am what I am!" - Popeye
After reading it though...it makes me PO'ed....thinking of what the future holds.It's just gonna get worse isn't it?It's scary what's being perpertrated on the younger generations of this country.[V]
Muggster
Greg
Former
USMC
ANGLICO
SEMPER FI MAC, SEMPER FI
You could bring toy guns to play at recess. At age 10, I would tie my .22 rifle to the handlebars of my bike, ride around to my favorite wooded area and shoot all day.
Take your home made sling shot to school and play "raise the can". (Shoot at the can and make it airborn).
Wore shoes only to school,church, and sometimes to Sears and Robuck where the air conditioning was a miracle of science.
Didn't really need a key to start the Studebaker.
Did we lock doors? What was a lock?
Made whistles out of the metal holed strapp found on the railroad tracks.
Sat on the front porch and swinged away in the cool night air.
Life was just as good then as it is now because that's what we knew!
far without "controled supervision?" by the government and a extra
10,000,000 new laws.
"Right is Right, even is everyone is against it, and wrong is wrong, even if everyone is for it"
I can't believe you youngsters can remember that far back[:D][:D][:D]
I can't believe you ol' farts can remember it at all! [:0][:D][:I]