For everyone over thirty!!

Poststructural Pub
1

TO ALL THE KIDS WHO
SURVIVED the


1930’s 40’s, 50’s, 60’s & 70’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 cots were covered with bright colored
lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our pushbikes, 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 garden 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 slingshots for our 10th birthdays,
made up games with sticks and tennis balls and although we were told it would happen, we did not put 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!

Under 12 footy had tryouts 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.

2

sounds very familiar!

3

And look at the kids you had!

(some one that calls themeselves I.D.10-t)

4

I know! (But I don’t get it. Must be the bangs I sustained riding recklessly downhill on bikes and in wagons.)

5

My teenagers are astounded that I used to ride my bike all over town for miles around with friends when I was 8. I bought them bikes a number of years ago and the bikes just sat in the garage. They also can’t see all the reading I do, not to mention ,<cough, cough> tin whistle playing. :roll:

Of course, we’d a rung their necks if they took off on bikes like that nowadays.
Tony

6

I’ll be sure to forward this to Azalin! :stuck_out_tongue:

7

I’m old enough for that to resonate with me but, much as I’d like to, I don’t think we can blame lawyers and politicians for the changes.

Lawyers can’t prosecute cases that people don’t file. Politicians can’t cramp our lives if we don’t elect them.

Part of the problem is that we are now cramped for space. Partly too, we now openly acknowledge dangers that were around back then—systematic child abuse, for example. But surely those of us over 30 are also collectively responsible, to some extent, for letting the world we live in take the form it currently does.

8

While it’s fun to nostalgitate, let’s not forgot that the past wasn’t simply the “good old days” and that today’s world is in many (not all or necessarily most) ways a better place to grow up.

9

The moral of the story is big government is bad – the anthem of the Republican Party. It smacks of anti trial lawyer Spam. You know, those bad lawyers that protect our rights when big corporations take advantage of us or harm us. I’ve seen this sort of thing on websites devoted to abolishing those silly class-action lawsuits. The coffee burn lady is their poster child.

10

You know, it’s odd perhaps, but I don’t remember the good old days as being all that good, myself.

Fact is, there is nothing back there I’d want to go back for. All of the good stuff for me started after I grew up; my childhood has very few pleasant memories for me, as I was one of the people you didn’t see and don’t remember.

You’d be surprised at how many of us there were.

–James

11

Everything on that list ‘resonates’ with me too, except for the broken bones and the ‘ute’. Never broken a bone (touch wood), and although we didn’t have a ‘ute’, my dad had an old Vespa… at weekends, he’d ferry us all one at a time to the local park on that thing.

Oh, and I didn’t get a catapult (‘slingshot’) for my 10th birthday… we used to make our own… but I did get an amazing multi-bladed penknife (and a thick ear for testing the saw-blade thereof on the garden fence). Came in very handy for making catapults.

Of course it wasn’t all a bed of roses, but looking around I wouldn’t want to be a kid growing up today.

12

It’s certainly more wussified then it was.

But remember, people also died of minor infections, had poorer dental hygene etc etc. Some of it wasn’t so good.

Remember the old Tonka toys? Made of steel. Virtually indestructable.

13

Hmm… I won’t accept “many”. “Some” is about as far as I’d be prepared to go.

When I take over the world the best bits of the past will be reintroduced as current policy, and the crappest bits of the present will be relegated to the past. :adminok:

So there.

14

i think this was one of the coolest toys i had as a kid…!!!

:slight_smile: :slight_smile: :slight_smile:

15

This was the coolest toy I got when I was a kid. The Secret Sam Briefcase. I got some great shots with the secret camera, and got some great shots at my brother too. All he had was a Man from U.N.C.L.E cap gun. The Secret Sam pistol/carbine shot plakky bullets (when it was in the case too) :smiling_imp:

16

What I’d like to ask kids today is:

Do computer games stifle or feed your imagination?

Would you trade your current allergies for a spoonful of dirt a day, and the odd scraped knee?

Would you be happy to walk to school everyday, if it reduced traffic and made the streets safer to walk to school every day?

If this reduction in traffic also reduced air pollution and saved you from getting asthma and eczema, would that be a good thing?

17

Always wanted one, never got one.

18

As I am about to turn 31 (Aug 25) I am on the boarder, but I think that my dad smoking a pack a day made up for that.

19

Just think how many more folks there would be in Baby Boomer and older generations still alive if some of this stuff had been around. :wink:

Tom

20

Yes to all the above and this;

Horse drawn milk wagons, delivering milk etc and watching the horse move on to the next stop by itself.

Icemen, delivering ice to each household every other day and us sneaking ice from the back of his truck. Iceboxes instead of refrigerators, the early fifties. Remembering when my mother got her first true refrigerator, Wringer washers, clotheslines instead of dryers!

Having Polio before the first vacines. When television was only black and white and having to go with your father to a shop to get a tube replaced.

No airconditioning, no fans, sleeping in the basement at night because at ten o’clock at night the temp was still over ninety and the humidity was there also.

Playing baseball and hockey in the street and nobody getting hit.

Yep that was life then, and very happy to have experienced it then but then I had no choice but to live it.

MakrB