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Joseph
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Ca. USA
Feb 2000
time: 21:28
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quote:
Sometimes I wonder, how did we survive?
My mother 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 mother used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.
Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring)
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.
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 and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did giveus 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 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 cable stations.
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 lot, 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, mother pulled out the 48 cent bottle of mercurochrome 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 mother 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 (physical abuse) here too. And then we got butt spanked again when we got home.
Mom invited the door to door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough Berber in the family room), and Dad drove a car with leaded gas.
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 lawn mower and I didn't even know that 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 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 survive?
The good old days. |
Just received this on the internet. Some of you younger people should read it.
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Comrade Tassadar
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A bit too conservative, and too American-centric to be true.
Remember, Americans have had VERY HIGH standards of living since about 1930.
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Seeker
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London Ontario
Jan 1970
time: 00:28
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I don't appreciate his humour.
Unless he's being satirical, in which case Python was better and I'm just being a boob.
I'm gonna break down what he's trying to say:
1. Pain builds character. An overprotective and milksoppy adult society has left kids unable to deal with frustration and disappointment in healthy ways.
'Kids today' are soft and need to be tougher. BS. Volunteer for community sentencing and get a look at the young offenders. Kids today need to be SOFTENED not 'toughened up'. I wish there were a few more plain old 'protective' parents. Protective in the sense of not driving their kids out onto the street.
2. The pledge to be under god(or the Canadian religious indoctrination crap, which we've been spared for sometime thank Odin): This is the thing that pisses me off about social cons....indignant anger at being forced to do and say things you don't believe in is 'whining'. If it wasn't for a **** of a lot of 'whining' there are a lot of priviledges that this generation currently enjoys. Yes, there is such a thing as real 'whining' but I think most adults know the difference. Yeah it was really great back in those days when we weren't allowed to question authority. After all the government/cops/principal know what's best for you. Cr of S.
3. The innocence and naivety of my hazily remembered smalll circle of well-off friends/people I saw on TV! Guess what...it wasn't domestic violence that increased, it was the fact that it's now considered wrong to smack your family around when their 'whining'.
And you know what, teens were having sex! Even during the World Wars, the Greatest Generations were having lots of unreportered, illicit sex....ESPECIALLY during the wars. Do you know just how many women my grandfather and great-uncle on my mom's side had sex with in Italy, 1944 (17 and 21 respectively at the time)? There was a small army of prostitutes following them around! Yep, as far back as we go in history, teens keep having sex....and the Cato's of the world always regard it as the worst thing in the world.
Ever think that your 'innocent and naive' generation must have had some pretty crappy ideas about how to treat women in general given what happened 1975-85? Wanna discuss the religious/political make-up of wife beater/broken/'dysfunctional' homes? Thought not.
Yeah, this might well be a joke making fun of these sorts of attitudes but what the hell I'm stuck in Shi Hwa on a Monday night with no English speakers around for far as can see so I'll hold forth wherever the fork I want to. OK!!??  
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MRT144
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Seattle Washington
Oct 2002
time: 21:28
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joseph, sounds like you should just commit suicide and get it over with.
as for me i prefer a world with computers and electronic music
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Ben Kenobi
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McGregornobi!
Oct 2002
time: 21:28
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Seems you need a dose of Wordsworth:
London 1802
Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee: she is a fen
Of stagnant waters: altar, sword, and pen,
Fireside, the heroic wealth of hall and bower,
Have forfeited their ancient English dower
Of inward happiness. We are selfish men;
Oh! raise us up, return to us again;
And give us manners, virtue, freedom, power.
Thy soul was like a Star, and dwelt apart:
Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea:
Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,
So didst thou travel on life's common way,
In cheerful godliness; and yet thy heart
The lowliest duties on herself did lay.
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09-06-2003 11:41
Who wrote that? Charlie Daniels?
(AKA.....I made a mistake 
)
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