This is a copy of an email I just got...

Sorry for the long read, but it really makes you realize how much things have changed over the years...

For those of us who are old enough to appreciate the following will really
enjoy this.

Subject: HOW DID WE SURVIVE??

Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have. As
children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the
back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat. Our baby
cribs were painted with bright colored lead based paint. We often chewed on
the crib, ingesting the paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors, or cabinets, and when
we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and
not from a bottle. 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. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.
We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and
used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or the BB gun was not
available. We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we
were never over weight; we were always outside playing. Little League had
tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't, had to learn to
deal with disappointment. 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. That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem
solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we
learned how to deal with it all.

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 (amazing we
aren't all brain dead from that), and staying in detention after school
caught all sorts of negative attention for about the next two weeks. We must
have had horribly damaged psyches. 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 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, 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 butt-whooped. 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
butt-whooped (physical abuse) there too... and then we got butt-whooped
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 pick 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 know 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?

This is the kind of "crap" that will get you booted off DU.com[:D]

wish i could have enjoyed that world.

I was born way too late.... [V]

No wonder some of us are so misunderstood now. My 16 year old daughter looks at me like I'm crazy when I tell her some of the things Ma and Pa made me do/did to me when I was younger. I landed here in the ass end of 59' and know exactly what you speak of. When and where did we go wrong? I just wish I could remember more of those good ole' days right now. Thanks for that!
MM419

Thanks for bringing back alot of memories Art. Man ,those were the days !

I remember a rather steep hillside on the site of an old winery (destroyed in th '06 quake)in Fremont CA. Those Tonka dump trucks could hold up to alot of abuse. Did they really intend for the dump bed to be large enough to hold a small boy's backside, while careening down a hillside?
IIRC, I did manage to bend the frame of my bike in that same area.

hell im only 20 and i remember the old metal tonka trucks. those were heavy and almost impossible to break belive me i tried.

OMG! I loved those! I hate plastic Tonka! They don't make your shins bleed like the metal ones.
I also loved those Lincoln Logs and Little people. Oh, and GI JOE!  GO JOE!! Don't forget TRANSFORMERS.

Transformers? [b]TRANSFORMERS?[/b] Youngins' these days...

heh, yeah.  i wonder how we managed not to kill ourselves off when machine guns could be manufactured, too.  just think, you could go down to the store, buy a new machinegun fairly inexpensively, then go mow down the local school.  crazy.  good thing we have all those laws restricting magazine capacity, machine gun manufacture, waiting periods, licenses, and all that.  its amazing we lived through the 19th and first half of the 20th century.

taken from paratrooper.net:
[img]http://paratrooper.net/aotw/pvtmurphy/storage/PM120.jpg[/img]
i think it illustrates the point quite well

Do any of you remember Stompers??? Remember those little battery powered 4x4 trucks that went through batteries like nobodies business. I miss those days [>(]