The Bad Old Days
In the US 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. 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
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 condoms (we wouldn't
have known what they were 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?
~Author Unknown~ |
