The Good Old Days

Most of you have probably seen this or something like it. It tends to float around the internet and from time to time I get it again. This time I wanted to share. Mostly because this is only a slice of how I feel about how far our current society has gone downhill since I was a kid. Yeah sure technology has cured a bunch more diseases and things are 'supposed' to be made easier by some 'progress' we have made in the last few decades. But, looking back, I would love to have another summer day when I got up had a bowl of cereal and bolted for the door yelling goodbye to my Mother and knowing that I wouldn't be back till the porch light blinked right after sunset. Me and my pals went all over the place and did oh so many things that nowadays would cause Mothers to scream in horror and could possibly even end up in jail time. What changed?

--------------------
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. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a
brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting
ecoli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of
a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

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.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem,
and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative
attention.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. 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, Play Station,
Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations.

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 (kids liked it better because it didn't sting
like iodine did) 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 there and then we got our butt spanked again when we
got home.

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 societal ills, that we didn't even
notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! How did we ever
survive?