HOW DID WE SURVIVE? As heard on the John Gambling Show on NewsTalk
Radio 77 WABC, New York
wabcradio.com
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 spend hours building our
go-carts out of scraps and then rode 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 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 were not ridiculed for this play, not thrown out of
school, and didn't all grow up as mass murderers. Most of us grew up
with guns in the house and rather than being taught to fear them, we
were taught to handle and use them responsibly.
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, church was somewhere your friends went
on Sunday too (except for the Murdocks down the street, but nobody
trusted them anyway),
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 over the counter 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. There was surely a Ho-Jo somewhere nearby that would have been
safer.
Summers were spent behind the sickle 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 Johnny 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? |
