How DID We Survive?

Question

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we've lived this long...

As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

Our baby cribs 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, locks on 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 play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able 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 robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or the BB gun was not available.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing.

Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade 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 of a pool, 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.

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 (amazing we aren't all brain dead from that), and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for about the next two weeks.

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 just can't recall how bored we were without Computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, or Cable TV. 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 butt-whooped. 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 butt-whooped there too... and then we got butt-whooped again when we got home.

Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee.

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 lawn 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 a neighbor 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 ever survive?????

Coincidentally, I got this in email just today...What are your thoughts?

Yep! - we had advantages...all that was in that piece and others that were noted below..:-)

Answer 1

Those of us who remember those simple days are the lucky ones. We learned to use our imagination in the absence of toys and t.v. and the internet etc. Books were read, prayers were said and life was predictable. Yes, it was a fine time to be a kid but todays kids don't know what the're missing so it does'nt bother them. The Amish and Mennonites still enjoy the simple life and good for them. If only we could all adopt their lifestyles, the good old days could be relived but our kids would find it intolerable. So c'est la vie.

Answer 2

Oh yes and it was all so thrilling. Please write the book. I love to read books that make me laugh out loud or ooh and aw. Just talked with the kids last week about the all the equipment they have to entertain the newborn babies. My goodness they move them from station to station and after 5 minutes decide the baby is tired in being in that position/place. Before my time but I know my grandmother left an infant or two under a shade tree at the end of row of crops while she worked the fields. There were not many fat kids when I was a young 'un we made our own entertainment. Had tree houses for Tarzan, played army crawling on our bellies through the woods, rode bikes to the landfill and pilfered the trash. Stole a watermelon ocasionally. Climbed trees. Only one in four broke a bone or had stitches each summer.

Answer 3

Yep, I remember when they cut the orange trees down and piled them into huge piles. We used to cut up, bruised and scraped breaking the branches off and little crawlways inside until we had a really neat fort. We even afterwards when the weeds in the fields got 5 feet high, used to dig tunnels that could have collapsed at any time for hundreds of feet to a huge dug in the ground fort we covered with plywood and dirt, complete with escape hatches in case we got caught. Yeah those were the days. Of course with the orange groves gone we couldn't throw oranges when we got in fights with neighbor kids so we threw rocks. I suppose that was risky but only one kid got hurt when he got hit in the head. But he was fine the next day. Maybe our heads were stronger then too.

Answer 4

And me and the other kids played out in the city streets
until 11pm in the summer.
Nary a worry.
Plus we used to jump off the
concrete levee into the river
below with one of those swing
ropes. Plus I went house to house selling girl scout cookies (with single guys inside and carrying money home.) edit: Oh, I forgot...
building the fort among the
high corn stalks over by the
railroad tracks. We smoked
the corn silk and put peanuts
on the tracks to squash and
watch the engineer scream.
We also stole fuzies and lighted them on the tracks
just so the train would stop.
We ran like hell!!!

Answer 5

We were quite an amazing bunch, weren't we? The kids before us, were tougher than us! Can you imagine.
I was thinking just today how my sisters and brother and I would go Trick or Treating, and be gone for hours. We went anywhere our legs were strong enough to take us. The worst thing that I ever recall happening, was once in a while the Teenagers would hide or drive by in a truck and throw horse apples at us.

Answer 6

WE ALSO HAD THESE ADVANTAGES:

1) Cars were slower and we could hear them coming.
2) We ate better tasting food with fewer preservatives and chemicals added.
3) We breathed cleaner air.
4) Although I owned a rifle and half my 11 year old friends did also, I never heard of a kid taking one to school.
5) Life was generally less complex and stress levels were lower.
6) We tended to exercise more, walked more and rested better after doing more manual labor.
7) Lower population and less conflict due to massive immigration and cultural conflict.
8) Families tended to be stronger, divorce rate lower, people relied on support from relatives and neighbors.
9) Technology was simpler - one could often repair their own vehicles at home with fewer tools needed.
10) It was quieter - less stress from indiscriminate noise from cell phones, car alarms, ghetto blasters,etc....

I could go on, but what's the point? Things balance out and one must live in the "here and now" or go nuts. I'm lucky because I love computers, cultural diversity, and cable TV.

I am still aware of the love of friends, family, and a higher power. Life requires a series of adjustments and I am alive because of the grace of God, not because of technological advancement.

Answer 7

Do I detect a hint of sarcasm?


funny how many crutches have been created for American society in such a short amount of time...

The more that are created the lazier we get, the lazier we get the more that are created.

I should have become a politician, but I lack the cheating characteristic which is essential to robbing value creators of their their livelihood.

Answer 8

A great description of kids' lives in the 50s.

Answer 9

I have to laugh; I deal with this every day...my daughter and her husband don't want my grandson on his tricycle without a helmet on. He hates the helmet (DUH) so I figure he's gonna be in high school before he rides an actual bike.

Of course, with all the chances we were allowed to take,some kids DID get seriously hurt and some died. I wonder if anyone has the statistics on that- then VS now?

Answer 10

We survived and so did our children because there was not someone on every corner telling us what was going to kill us and what we had to buy and do to live a life. I will feel good about wearing a seat belt once they tell me more people are not dying in hospitals errors than in car wrecks.