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John Landess
I borrowed this from an email an "older" friend sent me
My Mom used to cut up chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get food poisoning.. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.. coli or samonella.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in a lake, river or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), and no beach closures then.
We all took PE ..... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Keds instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now. We climbed jungle gyms, bailed out of swings, and off of merry-go-rounds that others were pushing as fast as they could... wow.
We got the "board of education" for doing something wrong at school (they used to call it discipline), yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honor and respect those older than us, and most of us stayed out of jail. We had 30+ kids in our classes and yet we all learned to read, write, do math and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter, FUNNY ABOUT THAT!! We even memorized history, state capitols, and other things I can mostly remember today. We also learned our times table by reciting them every day (rote??). Things to proud off were things like standing in the middle of the street on the 'safety patrol', being on a sports team, or a spelling bee.
We said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention at home (usually from Dad).
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Ipods, Iphones, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. So, I guess we weren't!! STRANGE??
We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the bottle of iodine and then we got our rear swatted. Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then Mom calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
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 never needed to get into group therapy and/or 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 ever survive?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!
ps.. Anyone ever have enough money to buy the Gilbert U238 Atomic Lab Chemestry Set to 'play' with??
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