TO ALL OF US KIDS WHO SURVIVED the 1930's, 40's, 50's, 60's and 70's!! Congratulations!!
To Those Born Between 1930 & 1979
We survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.
They took aspirin, ate Blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and they didn’t get tested for diabetes.
Then after all that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paint.
There were no “Child Proof” lids on medicine bottles, or child proof doors on cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we did not have helmets, and look at the risks we took hitchhiking.
As infants and children, we rode in cars with no child car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
On hot summer days, we drank water from the garden hose, not from a bottle. We shared one soda pop with four friends from one bottle and no one died from doing this.
We ate cupcakes, donuts, white bread, real butter, lots of bacon and red meat. We drank Kool-aid with real sugar, yet very few of us were overweight because WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!
We guys played “Cowboys and Indians”, “Cops and Robbers”, and we even played “war”, where most of our “guns” were made from broom sticks, and we didn’t grow up to be killers, muggers or bank robbers.
In school and at home with our friends, we played “tag”, “dodge ball”, etc, and it did NOT damage our psyches or egos.
We would leave home in the mornings and play all day long, and nobody cared as long as we were home when the streetlights came on. Nobody was able to reach us all day, AND WE WERE OK!
We would spend hours on end building go-carts out of scrapes we collected, and ride down a hill, only to discover that we didn’t have any brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve that problem.
We did not have Play stations, Nintendo’s, X-Boxes. We had no video games, 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.
We fell out of trees and got cuts, skinned knees, broken bones, chipped teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies (made with real mud), and the worms didn’t live inside us for ever. We swallowed watermelon pits and we didn’t grow watermelons inside us.
We were given BB guns on our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls, and even though we were told it would happen, we didn’t put out very many eyes.
We rode our bikes or walked to a friend’s house, where we rang the bell, knocked on the door or just walked in and talked to them.
Little league had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t make the team had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
We had friends and relatives who died in accidents or from illness, and we learned to deal with our grief with the support of our families and places of worship, and learned that death was a PART of life. We got through it and did not need “grief counselors”, paid for by taxpayers, to get us through it.
The idea of our parents bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. Most of the time, our parents sided with the law.
Our generation produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever! During the past 50 years, we have seen an explosion of innovations and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
If you are one of these folks, CONGRATULATIONS! You may wish to share this with others who have had the good fortune to grow up at a time before lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives “for our own good.”
While you are at it, share this with your kids and grand kids so that they will know how lucky and brave their parents/grandparents were.
Kind of makes you want to run around the house with a pair of scissors in your hand, don’t it?
Now, a word from Jay Leno:
“With hurricanes, tornados, forest fires, out of control, mud slides, flooding, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to the other, with the threat of bird-flu and terrorist attacks, are we sure that this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?
“Abouna” Gregori
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