PEOPLE OVER FORTY SHOULD BE DEAD

EMail | 1/17/2004 | W. Toeppe

[JesseHousman]

People Over 40 Should Be Dead

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 40's, 50's, 60's, or even maybe the early 70's probably shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint. 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.) As children, we would ride in cars with no seatbelts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors! We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing. We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode 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 would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day.

NO CELL PHONES!!!!! Unthinkable!

We did not have Playstations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms! . We had friends! We went outside and found them. We played dodge ball, and sometimes, the ball would really hurt. We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame but us. Remember accidents?

We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever. We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Some students weren't! as smart as others, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Horrors! Tests were not adjusted for any reason.

Our actions were our own. Consequences were expected. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and problem solvers and inventors, ever. The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

How fortunate we were to grow up as kids before lawyers and burgeoning government regulated our lives, for our own good. How sorry I am for what those years of meddling have done to our children and grandchildren and even sorrier that we all allowed the government and politicians to get away with it!

[brooklin]

Man, it's a wonder that you're alive... eating tar, birch bark and the really bad one, scrapple.

[livius]

this is so old that my mother emailed it to me from her retirement community

Actually, somebody in Spain e-mailed me a Spanish version of this just about a month ago. It was adapted for all of the wild things Spanish kids used to do 40 years ago (many of them involved taunting bulls). Great read, and it just shows that we're all in the same dull, modern, lawyer-infested boat.

[Gabz]

We love it here - and can target shoot in our yard also because we live out in the country and our nearest neighbors are 60,000 chickens!!!!

[ArneFufkin]

Ah yes, buying those useless baseball and football trading cards JUST to savor that freeze dried, ready to crumble into millions of pieces chewing gum.

Later, we found a treat with the same consistency, taste and longevity as that chewing delight ... carrots.

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

And our Social Security programs would have a surplus of cash as most people who paid in would have died before becoming eligible for retirement.
Blame it on Pennicillin.

[ArneFufkin]

Blame it all on the invention of shrinks in the late 50s and early 60s!

Are you sure? I think there were midgets in the Wizard of OZ .

[nutmeg]

read later bump

[mrs tiggywinkle]

**That's another reason why I homeschool. My kids love American History. The real history, not the revisionist crap they are teaching in schools today. **

Big ole bump!

For some wonderful history try Charles Coffin's books. He was a civil war journalist. :o)

[randog]

My remembrance was walking! especially in Junior High it was far. about 1 1/2 hr from my house, and we had to walk, and possibly were given a ride if a bridge was flooded out!

LOL!! Yeah, I did my share of walking, just like you. The closest grocery store was a mile away; I walked to high school (until I got a car)--3 miles away through a drainage tunnel under the highway, through the graveyard with a shortcut across the river if it was low enough.

[exit82]

"Sometimes we'd take our 22's with us."

"Watch it kid--you'll shoot yer eye out!"

Playing stickball in the schoolyard.

Softball at the nearest intersection. Taking a collection to pay for Mr. So and So's resulting broken window.

Playing until dark.

Knowing your father's whistle to come in for dinner. Hey Johnny, yer dad's whistlin' for ya!

Can Billy come out to play?

Playing hide and seek until you couldn't see through the darkness.

Hurrying to eat lunch or dinner, cause you didn't want to miss what was happen' outside with your buddies.

Playing war for hours--in the woods--with realistic looking plastic tommy guns and rifles. Americans won--every time.

Playing with a Johnny Reb cannon.

Making a raft out of a piece of plywood and poling along in the local pond--with no lifejackets or handrails,even.

Ice skating on same pond in the cold winter afternoons and evenings.

Playing dodgeball--for keeps!

My, how did we survive.

[mrs tiggywinkle]

True, healthy pride comes from having to actually work for something. These days kids are encouraged to be proud without having done *anything*.

[Ciexyz]

I always came in when Mister Ed came on TV.

[man of Yosemite]

I can remember leaving home to walk a mile and a half to the foot of the mountains, then hike three miles to the top. My parents never knew what I was doing as long as I made it home for dinner. Looking back now, I wonder how we got away with stuff like that.

[dalereed]

"I think there were midgets in the Wizard of OZ "

Wouldn't know, never saw it.

I never got into that fantasy BS.

[mrs tiggywinkle]

**The most heinous act I can remember was some upperclass guys kidnapped a pig and a sheep from a farm outside town and locked them in the study hall overnight. Rumor had it they were fed a healthy meal of Ex-Lax. **

LOL...that's *so* wrong. :o)

In high school I owned one of the keys to the music rooms. My friends and I counted 91 rolls of toilet paper and had a blast in the band room. The tuba was never the same.

Good clean fun.

[BluH2o]

Recently returned from a trip to Tasmania. While there, my wife and I walked by a children's play yard. The theme of the playyard was a pirate ship, there were rope ladders to climb, the bow pulpit extended up at an angle maybe six feet above the ground (it was designed to climb or slide up or down on). My wife and I both agreed, it was highly unlikely that you would see anything like this in the U.S. (it was well done & looked like fun) for fear of lawsuits if, God forbid, some kid fell off and broke an arm or collar bone. We're raising a generation of coddled wimps here in the U.S., tort reform is sorely needed in this nation.

[arasina]

Ahhh....the memories of real freedom! No locks on doors, outside playing until it got too dark to see, riding bikes with your friends on roads where cars were rare, playing games like tag and "sandwich" and Red Rover, picking up grasshoppers and hoping they'd spit their "tobacco" juice, playing with paper dolls , watching Captain Kangaroo on TV, eating paste/dirt/tar/leaves, covering dimes with mercury, driving a homemade Go-Kart in the back yard, dressing up for church on Sunday---including white cotton gloves in the warmer months---and going for a drive with Mom and Dad afterward...and thousands more.

Those were the BPC days: Before Politically Correct. Does anyone remember exactly when things started taking a turn toward our current emprisoning lifestyle?

[SeeRushToldU_So]

Not of todays kids are wimps. I have a beautiful 14 year old(Cheers compitely) that jumped off a 65 foot bridge this summer.

I didn't know about it until after she had done it, and I didn't know wheather to kick her butt or high five her.

Her mother, and my wife, blamed it all on my genes.

I told my daughter, you lived and you are the only girl to have ever jumped from here, don't do it again. (Amen, thank you Lord she didn't die.)

[ArneFufkin]

PEOPLE OVER 40 SHOULD BE DEAD

Adrienne Barbeau is 59. Raquel Welch is 63. Pam Grier is 55. Tina Louise is 70. There was a summit of the world's leading Paleontoligists gathered just to estimate the age of Cher at somewhere between 459 and 472.

[ArneFufkin]

Wouldn't know, never saw it. I never got into that fantasy BS.

If I ever need advice on the best documentary or newsreel to see on a date, I'll ping you.