nimbushopper wrote:
This is long and if you're under 65 it might mean little or nothing to you. For those over that age, take a walk down memory lane.
Remember when?
It took three minutes for the TV to warm up?
Nobody owned a purebred dog?
When a quarter was a decent allowance?
You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny?
Your Mom wore nylons that came in two pieces?
You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time?
And you didn't pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?
Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box?
It was considered a great privilege to be taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents?
They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed...and they did it!
When a 57 Chevy was everyone's dream car...
to cruise, peel out, lay rubber or watch submarine races, and people went steady
No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked?
Lying on your back in the grass with your friends and saying things like, 'That cloud looks like a...'?
Playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules of the game?
Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to poison a perfect stranger?
And with all our progress, don't you just wish, just once, you could slip back in time and savour the slower pace, and share it with the children of today.
When being sent to the principal's office was nothing compared to the fate that awaited the student at home?
Basically, we were in fear for our lives, but it wasn't because of drive-by shootings, drugs, gangs, etc. Our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat! But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.
...as well as summers filled with bike rides, Hula Hoops, and visits to the pool, and eating Kool-Aid powder with sugar.
Didn't that feel good, just to go back and say, 'Yeah, I remember that?
Newsreels before the movie.
Telephone numbers with a word prefix...( Yukon 2-601).
Party lines.
Peashooters.
Hi-Fi's & 45 RPM records.
78 RPM records!
Green Stamps.
Mimeograph paper.
The Fort Apache Play Set.
Do You Remember a Time When...
Decisions were made by going "one potato, two potato...."
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, 'Do Over!'?
'Race issue' meant arguing about who ran the fastest?
Catching The Fireflies Could Happily Occupy An Entire Evening?
It wasn't odd to have two or three 'Best Friends'?
Having a Weapon in School meant being caught with a Slingshot?
Saturday morning cartoons weren't 30-minute commercials for action figures?
'Oly-oly-oxen-free' made perfect sense?
Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was cause for giggles?
The Worst Embarrassment was being picked last for a team?
War was a card game?
Baseball cards in the spokes transformed any bike into a motorcycle?
Taking drugs meant orange-flavoured chewable aspirin?
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon?
Candy cigarettes
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with coloured sugar water inside.
Soda pop machines dispensed glass bottles.
Coffee shops with Table Side Jukeboxes.
Blackjack, Clove and Teaberry chewing gum.
If you can remember most or all of these, Then You Have Lived!!!!!!!
Pass this on to anyone who may need a break from their 'Grown-Up' Life.
I am sharing this with you today because it ended with a Double Dog Dare to pass it on.
And remember that the perfect age is somewhere between old enough to know better and too young to care.
Send this on to someone who can still remember Howdy Doody and The Peanut Gallery, the Lone Ranger, The Shadow Knows, Nellie Bell, Roy and Dale, Trigger and Buttermilk.
This is long and if you're under 65 it might mean ... (
show quote)
While I REMEMBER all that stuff, I have no longing to repeat its experience. For all the sentimentality of that era, we forget the Cold War, the Atomic Age, "Duck and Cover," endemic racism, fake WASP history brainwashing, war in Korea and Viet Nam designed to preserve the military-industrial complex, various assassinations, asinine attitudes towards modern music, book burning fundamentalist idiots, DDT, Agent Orange, hippies, yippies, the Ohio river burning, Johnson's escalations, Kent State, Nixon's escalations and Watergate, the supposed "dangers" of rock-and-roll, the rise of the "third world"...
Life is a flawed existence. We are a tremendous species with great potential, but we are on the cusp of many different crises. Collectively, we need to shed the innocence of our childhoods and meet the challenges of the present and the future. It is OUR responsibility. Most of the fundamental issues we confront today were present in the late 1960s. If you were paying attention, you knew about them from your school classes, and you were outraged. Yet we have not solved the biggest issues. Instead, we drank our beer and wine, smoked our pot, screwed ourselves silly, earned a pile of money, raised privileged kids, and looked the other way as mega-capitalists bought all the politicians a re-election and got what THEY wanted, which was to rape the planet and the little guy in pursuit of their posh status. We need look no further than Putin to see where that leads...