Dan64456

The way it used to be:

You could hardly see for all the snow,
Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go.
Pull a chair up to the TV set,
'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'
My Mom 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 Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, 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), 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 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.
Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school 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 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 TV cable stations.


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, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of mercurochrome (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) 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 Mom 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 there and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.




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 social ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!when we watched comedians they didn't use every foul words out there to be funny. Thank God for that.
How did we ever survive?
LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!
Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.

New B

Reminds of of that one country song "It was a different world."

III Corps

I see the biggest change is instead of a group of people banding together to get something done, the refrain now is, "The government should do something." Individual effort and achievement is passe'.

atpcliff

Hi!

I'm a History major, so all the "Good Old Days" stuff is of great interest.

In the past, things were different: Some things were worse, some better. Things have changed, and they are different now.

Let's look at Texas prior to 1970 in two areas:
Helmets were not required for riding bicycles or motorcycles (We weren't restricted so much by the gov't in the "Good Old Days")
The age of consent was raised to 8 (this was the "Good Old Days" ???)

That things change, is not good or bad, it is just different, and it's how the universe works.

The only thing you can do, is TRY today, right now. Yesterday is over, and tomorrow has not yet come.

If you TRY today, your life will be the best it can be.

God Bless!

cliff
NBO

Moose

I like the saying that unlike the "good ole times", today we take comedians seriously and view politicians as jokes. How true is that!

alarkyokie

"I don't make jokes. I just watch the government and report the facts."

Will Rogers