How Times Have Changed

I love things that get around via social media and are reminders of just how different these times are from say growing up in the 50’s and 60’s and even in some cases the 70’s.

Take for example this one:

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 same counter and I used to eat it raw sometimes. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers but I can’t remember getting e coli.

We ALL took gym, not PE and risked permanent injury with a pair of high top $9.95 Keds instead of having $180.00 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 today. Flunking gym was not an option, even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem and staying in detention after school caused major problems at home.

We must have had horribly damaged psyches. 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, Play Station, Nintendo, x-box or 800 TV channels to choose from.

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 later we got out 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.

I remember the kid 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 gave him a smack for being such a goof.

To top it off not a single person I knew had ever been told they were from a dysfunctional family. My of my how times have changed.