That reminded me of the PETA propaganda turning fish into sea kittens...
How could you ? / S
Posted on 06/15/2015 5:08:46 AM PDT by knarf
First, you survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us. They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a tin, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, your baby cots were covered with bright colored lead-based paints. You had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when you rode your bikes, you had no helmets, not to mention, the risks you took hitchhiking ..
As children, you would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.Riding in the back of a van - loose - was always great fun.
You drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle. You shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this. You ate cakes, white bread and real butter and drank pop with sugar in it, but you weren't overweight because...... YOU WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
You 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 you all day. And you were OK. You would spend hours building your go-carts out of scraps and then ride down the hill, only to find out you forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, you learned to solve the problem .
You did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no mobile phones, no text messaging, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........YOU HAD FRIENDS and you went outside and found them!
You fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents you played with worms(well most boys did) and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
You made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although you were told it would happen, you did not poke out any eyes. You rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Local teams had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing you out if you broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. You had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and you learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL! And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS! 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 our lives for our own good. And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.
You played “Army” with toy guns, and never got kicked out of school for it. You played dodgeball and “tackle ball” on the playground at recess, and survived.
When I was a kid I made it a point NOT TO wear any shoes from the last day of school to the first day of the next year.
Originally I did it because we were poor and my old shoes had worn out on the last day of school- but then I just got to liking it. And I played in the woods and road my bike all barefoot.
We also made it a point to leave the house first thing in the AM and not come home until the street lights came on- spending all day in the woods. It was the most awesome part of my childhood
NO ONE can touch nor infect with PC ... our memories ....
We Are Real And Invincible.
I fished in rivers and lakes and didn’t need a permit, had a lemonade stand and didn’t need a permit, shot my bb gun in the backyard and didn’t need a permit and burned the family garbage in the can in the backyard and didn’t need a permit,...
ping yer lists
And if something you did offended a neighbor ... y’yelled at each other, went inside and fumed, and forgot about it the next day
And every child ate peanut butter sandwiches, and none died of peanut allergies.
That reminded me of the PETA propaganda turning fish into sea kittens...
How could you ? / S
I grew up in San Diego. We rode our bikes all day all over the place. We rode our bikes all the way out to Mirimar just to watch the jets land (just because we were in love with airplanes. Still are). We rode our bikes to the beach. We rode our bikes to the zoo (kids were free back then). We rode our bikes clear out to the old San Diego River dam the friars had built just to catch crawdads and hauled them all the way home. We played war in and around the canyons near our homes (we had some awesome forts!). And yep, we just had to be home for dinner. Then we went outside and played hide and go seek until our moms called us.
Sounds like you city kids had it pretty easy. We rural kids actually had to do chores! We learned fast to avoid to Holstein bull as he would run over you. We headed for the river without life jackets or life guards. I learned you cannot outrun 300 hungry sheep while dragging 2- 5 gallon buckets of feed. Was given a shotgun and told to bring home some supper at 7 yrs old. Went to school populated by mean nuns who carried yard sticks and used them accordingly. (I’m sure they went to a Chuck Norris yardstick school) Had to walk home 2 miles because the road was too muddy for a car and bring the milk cows home with you through the east pasture. Learned how to run fast to beat an angry sow to the fence. We were even allowed to carry sharp knives when butchering and plucking a chicken!
I agree. How did we survive?
At night we went out and caught fireflys in an empty peanut butter jar and stared for many long moments at them, counting flashes, watching them slowly slow down (oxygen starvation?), who got the most fireflys ? .... we schooled ourselves in science and physics and had no words nor vocabulary for what we learned ..... we weren’t told something and told to remember it .... we actually LEARNED stuff !
I grew up on the south side of Chicago. our big summertime game was kitty corner. 4 street corners. Kind of like musical chair with street corner curbs for chairs. I don’t think I ever heard my parents yell - watch out for cars.
I can still remember my father cutting the seat belts out of the car whenever he brought a new car home. He hated clutter and always thought the seat belts just got in the way of things. I still remember his 8-tracks too. Always the same ones including Johnny Cash, Wanda Jackson and Boots Randolph (Yakety-Sax).
We played tackle football in the same field. Gear? Yeah, we had a football, that was all the specialized gear we had.
BB guns, matches, woods, and creeks, and forts/treehouses... Bicycle ramps and jumps... Yeah, between us we broke a few bones, dislocated a couple of things, fair number of stitches... But we all survived.
We grew up together, we liked and respected one another. We recognized that while we were all "equal" we were not all "equal" and there wasn't always an equal outcome. We weren't all winners all the time, we weren't all losers all the time. We learned that even if you worked hard, practiced, tried your best...Tommy S. was always going to be bigger and stronger than you, and if he tackled you in Jerry W.'s backyard playing football it was going to hurt. No matter how hard we tried, none of us were ever going to throw a ball as well as Dave B. We didn't all get trophies or ribbons at the end of the games. We got teased for bone-headed mistakes, we got congratulated on great catches. We learned true self-esteem, that which is earned. We learned to take care of each other - even when we were the reason Mark H. was holding a rag on a bloody arm, or you were helping Mike M. limp home.
I think kids are really missing something by not having these kinds of shared experiences.
Always the proper and appropriate accompanying sounds like .. when you 'bubble' your lips and make the 'broom broom' sound ....
An entire battle would ensue, not really caring who was the enemy but that it was two 'guys' battling and ultimately ending with a large rock (or BOTH of us dropping them) on the scene in an explosive finale of aerial bombing .... and we'd hop on our bikes to go get Ralph or Eddy.
My nomination for Post of the Year.
Kudos.
Hi knarf, I hope you are well. Thank you for posting this.
I like the slug line about being from a generation of risk-takers,problem solvers, and inventors. I’ve often thought that as a society we would be well served to return to our childlike qualities of curiosity and forgiveness. Somehow when we attain 14-15 we forfeit our risk taking, creative, team approach (among many others).
I’ll never forget playing baseball with my friends while barefoot. I’d never heard of Shoeless Joe. But when Billy stepped on my toes (he had shoes on) and I bit his nose drawing blood, everything was settled. He stayed one of my best friends.
Gwjack
I just spent the weekend at an area wide campout with 250 of my closest friend, the vast majority of which were young men ages 5-18, (See my tagline for a big clue)
On Friday night, a whopper of a storm came through so they moved the kids into a gym for an hour. I was doing something else but I heard that a game of dodge ball with 250 kids is pretty exciting.
The next day, during a few minutes of free time, I walked over to a baseball field. There were about 25 5-7 year old boys playing kickball. Without a ball. It actually looked like they were playing an actual game.
Some of the organized challenges included an obstacle course, big slip and slide down a hill (soapy water) knife and tomahawk throwing and a bunch of other stuff.
In other words, those boys were boys.
We dealt with a nosebleed and skinned knee. I’m sure some other First Aid kits came out too.
Bummer. Boys...deal with it.
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