To all the kids who survived...

[Highlander]

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED the
1930's 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's, and Early-ish 80's !!

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us.
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes.
Then after that trauma, our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paints.
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 seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a ute on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drink with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because...

WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on.
No one was able to reach us all day. And we were O.K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then ride 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 did not have Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, no video tape movies, no surround sound, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.

We were given cowboy guns for our 10th birthdays, made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not poke out very many eyes.
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just walked in and talked to them!
The town football club had tryout for the junior team and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!!
The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law!
This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, 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!

And YOU are one of them! CONGRATULATIONS!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good. and while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn't it?!

[DemonWolf]

haha.. classic. =)

[Karma]

Mud pie? You want ketchup with that?

[Highlander]

Mud pie? You want ketchup with that?

Nah, but you better supersize it.

[Karma]

Nah, but you better supersize it.

Best one I like at the moment is McDonalds doing that 4 big Macs for $12 bit. Which one of you fat fuckers is eating 4 big macs at a time! :eyepoke:

[SARGE]

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have.......

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, but I can't remember getting -E-Coli.


We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not available.

Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade.

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 stayed in detention after school and caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two weeks. 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 give us a couple of 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, PlayStation, 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 20, 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, Mom 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 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 (physical abuse) ... and then we got our 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 lawnmower 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 ? ! ? ! ? ! ? ! ?

[ManDownUnder]

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have.......

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.




How did we survive ? ! ? ! ? ! ? ! ?

I think you summed it up... you didn't survive...

You LIVED

[Goblin]

I remember dads old golden holden with a huge hole in the back seat floor. We kids used to put rubbish down it as we were driving along. The hole was big enough to fit both feet in it, dangerous as.
Guy Fawkes used to be so much fun too. Dad used to make accetilene(sp?) and oxy bombs in a car inner-tube. My sister & I were bouncing around in the back of the stationwagon as we took it home.When he lit it the explosion was heard way over the other side of the lake and nobody ever complained or got hurt.
We lived at the foot of Mt Ngongotaha and that was our playground. Parents never had to tell us to go outside and play as we were all good mates with all the kids in the neighborhood and used to bugger off at first light and get home at dusk, starving hungry. We ate real food and never complained.


Dont spoil your kids by making life easy for them.

[SARGE]

I think you summed it up... you didn't survive...

You LIVED

hell man.. i remember riding on the package tray of a 72 Ford LTD ( up in the back window) from Upstate NY to Bristol Tennesee for the NASCAR race..


"dad.. can i ride in the Trunk? (boot)"

sure..

"dad.. can i have that old riding lawnmower and the Sportster engine?"

Sure..

"dad.. im taking the shotguns out in the woods with Dave"

be home by sunset..


if i wasnt .. off came the belt and i accepted that ..

[Wolf]

We were just lucky, damn it! Pure blind dumb luck that the million-to-one chance that we wouldn't injure, maim or kill ourselves (or others) came up 999 times out of a thousand.

We all were statistical anomalies, constantly beating the seemingly insurmountable odds against survival that our current world strives to protect us from.

Shit, we should've all bought lottery tickets and hit the casinos in case the freakish luck that we enjoyed surviving our dangerous lives extended to the gaming tables...

Actually, we truly were lucky - lucky to have had that time and kids these days are impoverished by its lack...

[ManDownUnder]

hell man.. i remember riding on the package tray of a 72 Ford LTD ( up in the back window) from Upstate NY to Bristol Tennesee for the NASCAR race..


"dad.. can i ride in the Trunk? (boot)"

sure..

"dad.. can i have that old riding lawnmower and the Sportster engine?"

Sure..

"dad.. im taking the shotguns out in the woods with Dave"

be home by sunset..


if i wasnt .. off came the belt and i accepted that ..

WOT?!?!?

Responsibility?
Boundaries?

Mate - you're clearly not from around these parts. The government won't let us have either and I, for one, will contact them to find out what my opinion is!

[ManDownUnder]

Actually, we truly were lucky - lucky to have had that time and kids these days are impoverished by its lack...

LOL - the hell they are. I'm on the lookout for good guys to hang around with - and my little man'll be coming with me.

He came and met a bunch of KBers the other day, and after soaking up a little of the language that was flying around whispered "fucken' arse" under his breath - just loud enough to be heard.

It was funny, but it also meant he got to see it in context. It's a rude word, it's this and it's that - but there's no denying... it's a REAL word. He'll come across it sooner or later.

Bloody funny too I might add... but we spoke about it.

[Wolf]

LOL - that hell they are. I'm on the lookout for good guys to hang around with - and my little man'll be coming with me.

He came and met a bunch of KBers the other day, and after soaking up a little of the language that was flying around whispered "fucken' arse" under his breath - just loud enough to be heard.

It was funny, but it also meant he got to see it in context. It's a rude word, it's this and it's that - but there's no denying... it's a REAL word. He'll come across it sooner or later.

Bloody funny too I might add... but we spoke about it.

Pissing myself!

I sat down on the folding chair outside and bashed my elbow on the edge of the barbeque (Whooops, better get OSH to come and sort that out!) and said "Ow-ow-ow-ow". My two year old said "Fuuuuck!" which was certainly appropriate to the situation.

[ManDownUnder]

Pissing myself!

I sat down on the folding chair outside and bashed my elbow on the edge of the barbeque (Whooops, better get OSH to come and sort that out!) and said "Ow-ow-ow-ow". My two year old said "Fuuuuck!" which was certainly appropriate to the situation.

Yup - that's the one. It's not right really - which makes it even funnier...!

[Motu]

All true - and I could tell you my childhood...just the same.But what I can't figure out is all the people who make these stupid fucking laws and go around blaming and sueing people for their own fuck ups - are are same age as me and had childhoods the same...where did they learn this shit from? Certainly not in our neighbourhood!