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I received this in my email and I wonder how many
others are old enough to remember what some of us call the good old
days. Did the boomers cause all of our
current problems?
<BLOCKQUOTE
TYPE="CITE">>>Subject: Looking back...>>Date: Tue, 14 Jan 2003
16:31:15 EST>>>>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. As children we
would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back ofa
pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. Our baby cribs,
toys and rooms were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We often
chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.We had no childproof lids on
medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets,and when we rode our bikes we had no
helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We
would leave home in the morning and playall day, as long as we were back
when the streetlights came on. No one wasable to reach us all day.We
played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.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 gunwas not available. We ate
cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda,but we were never
overweight; we were always outside playing. Little League had tryouts and
not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to dealwith
disappointment.Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work
hard so they failed agrade 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 ofa 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 for
out 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
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
regulation cap and everything.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 rationalizethrough the denial of the
dangers thatcould 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 onthat 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
Igot 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 our butt
spanked again when we got home.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).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
social ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking
Prozac!How did we survive?
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