I don’t know how old you have to be to get emails like the one I got the other day but I assume, and I certainly hope, there’s some minimum age. For this one it’s probably only 30 but it should really be 50. It’s one of those things that hearkens back to the good old days and how much better things were then. To tell you the truth these things annoy the bejeezis out of me. Hindsight is said to be 20/20 but I’m betting that nostalgia is legally blind. Being an argumentative S.O.B. I had to send it back to my friend and to several others and now I’m sharing my rant with the rest of the world. I know people mean no harm when they come up with this nonsense but it does tend to set me off. So here it is with my responses.
TO THOSE BORN 1920-1979
TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!!
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.
Well, yeah, the ones who didn’t survive aren’t sending any emails, are they?
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
Again, the ones who suffocated in their cribs aren’t sending emails. You would have a lot of trouble convincing me that George W. Bush didn’t eat a LOT of paint off of his crib.
I bet he chewed it for quite a while too.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
Again self selecting. The overdoses were mostly self administered and came in high school or later.
As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.
Again, self selecting, I’m told that in the world of finance it’s called survivorship bias. The ones who went through the windshield aren’t sending any emails.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
Right up until the day our Uncle swerved to avoid a squirrel in the road and one of us was thrown from the pickup bed. We miss him.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
I’m not sure what the point of this one is. Most of the stuff in bottles just comes from someone else’s city water supply.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
That’s to be expected. The danger was meningitis and it was from sharing water.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank Kool-aid made with sugar, but we weren't overweight because,
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!
Again self selecting since the fat kids mostly had heart attacks and died in their 40s.
We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We weren’t aware of it at the time but probably somebody’s mom was keeping an eye on us because they (the moms) were almost all at home. There’s a couple of reasons for this that I can think of. First Dad was the breadwinner he probably didn’t want the “little woman” out of the house. In my childhood not very many families had more than one car, or one TV, or one phone. No computers, no cable. Expenses were lower.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD's, no surround-sound or CD's, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or chat rooms.......
WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
Well yeah. If we had Nintendo, 150 Channels on TV, etc. I probably wouldn’t have left the house. I hardly ever do now. I spend most days forwarding jokes and answering stuff like this!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
Until our older cousins got to be lawyers and started trolling for business.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
Self selecting again. Let’s face it. Unless you’re in Haiti and dirt is all there is to eat, it’s not a good diet choice and even if you’re in Haiti it’s not a healthy choice.
We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out very many eyes.
That’s because we were warned about it CONSTANTLY. And how many is not “very many”
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
That was before those two guys in “In Cold Blood” walked in and talked to the Clutter family in 1959. Well actually until Capote’s book about them when people decided locking the door was a cheap, effective security system.
Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
I have to agree with this one. Kids know there’s a scoreboard and they want to be on the winning side. I do believe everybody should play who makes the team but we shouldn’t all play. We shouldn’t all sing either. We definitely should not all sing!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
They were right about that too. Remember the term “Juvenile Delinquents” became popular in the 50s to describe kids born in the 30s and 40s.
These generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever!
Well, yeah but Thomas Edison was born well before these generations and the ones born in the 80s and 90s are just beginning to produce. They’re also as likely as not to come from someplace other than the U-S so get ready for the whining about that too.
The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
Yeah, well calm down. Remember the director of the U-S Patent Office said they should go out of business I because EVERYTHING had been invented and that was in the 1890s.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!
BFD. So did every generation before us. There was a group around in the latter half of the 18th century that did some good work that you may have heard about.
If YOU are one of them CONGRATULATIONS!
Oh yeah, Congratulations. God forbid that our generation should go five minutes without being congratulated-by ourselves if nobody else comes forward-for some minor accomplishment.
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good.
Oh yeah. Government, the people we elected and keep reelecting is doing such a horrible thing by inspecting food and watching over banks.
Let’s face it, if the government had regulated Mortgage Brokers so they wouldn’t make loans to people they knew couldn’t repay them and then package up those loans and sell them to greedy investors who then expect the government to bail out their asses because they made unwise investments the whole mortgage mess could have been avoided.
Every time I hear some conservative say “we need to get the government out of regulating business” I shudder. I’m all for capitalism as long as someone who is reasonable honest is holding a gun on them
The fact is that almost all government regulations are the result of some excess by some group who took advantage of a lack of regulation to profit at the expense of others, usually you and me.
While you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave (and lucky) their parents were.
That’ll really cement your relationship with your kids, send them this and tell them how great their parents are for the extreme wisdom to be born at a fortuitous moment.
Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!
Please do. I’ll call 9-1-1 (another one of those government agencies you detest so much) for you if you stab yourself while being that stupid.
The quote of the month is by Jay Leno:
"With hurricanes, tornados, fires out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, and with the threat of bird flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?"
Well, let’s look at this for a second.
We have hurricanes, tornados, out of control fires, mud slides, flooding, terrorist threats and threat of bird flu WITH God in the Pledge of Allegiance.
What exactly do you think it’s done for you so far?
Looks to me like The Lord ain’t buying what you’re selling.
Or maybe God is actually smart enough to see when He’s being pandered to?
Maybe God doesn’t really enjoy being treated like a jukebox where if you drop in the correct number of prayers said in the right way at the right time in the right language as a way of determining who should live and how well.
Maybe God wants us to live it instead of just say it.
Maybe God would appreciate it if we got to work at something more important than patting ourselves on the back for everything we’ve done, like looking for what still needs to be done and doing that.
