For my generation of the 50s and 60s: My Mom used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread mayo on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but, for some odd reason, we didnt seem to get food poisoning. My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I cant remember getting e.coli. 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 Keds (only worn in gym) instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors. I cant 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 the non-athletic types! I guess PE must be much harder than gym. Speaking of school, we said prayers and proudly sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school wasnt some sort of badge of honor, but we 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 was under the impression growing up that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself. I just cant recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We played king of the hill on piles of gravel at the old gravel pits and that which was 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 didnt sting like iodine did) and then we got our butt spanked. Now its a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $50 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 didnt act up at the neighbors 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 a friend 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 back then. 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 way back when, that we didnt even notice that the entire country wasnt taking Ativan, BuSpar, Haldol, Imipramine, Luvox, Paxil, Prolixin, Prozac, Quetiapine, Remeron, Ritalin, Saphris, Thorazine, Trazodone, Valium, or Xanax! How in the world did we ever survive my friends?
Posted on: Tue, 23 Sep 2014 15:41:55 +0000
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