Looking Back - How Did We survive? If you lived as a child in the 40's, 50's, 60's or 70's,  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, or locks on doors, or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets, not to mention hitchhiking to town as a young kid. 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 usually walked to a one room schoolhouse in the 1930s and 1940s.  One teacher taught all 8 grades and was also the school nurse and janitor having to make the fire to keep the room warm all day.  We usually had to carry the water in a bucket from a neighbor's house to the school and we had outhouses for our bathroom. Speaking of school, we all said Prayers and the Pledge of Allegiance(amazing we aren't all brain dead from that). 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. 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. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. (Horrors) 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. We shared one grape soda with four friends, from one bottle and no one died from this. We had fights and punched each other and got black and blue and learned to get over it. 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 played dodgeball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We got cut and broke bones and broke teeth, and there were no law suits from these accidents. They were accidents. No one was to blame, but us. Remember accidents? No cell phones. Unthinkable. 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. 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 that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, 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 $99 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. Dad drove a car with leaded gas. Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play. 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? 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? The past 50 years has 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're one of them. Congratulations! Copied from E-mail on the Internet - Author Unknown)

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