How Did We Survive?

I just saw a reference to “Greenie Stickum Caps”. I doubt that many of my readers know what those are or appreciate what a technological advancement they were. Before stickum caps arrived, we had the tedious chore of loading a roll of caps into our guns. Mattel gave us the freedom to quickly stick individual caps on our fake bullets, fire away with our revolver – six times – and then peel off the used caps and stick some more on. That special Mattel gun even fired those Mattel plastic shells at a target (I’m sure my target – my sister – remembers).

Parents today don’t buy their kids toy guns because they think it’s a gateway to the real thing. If we hadn’t had toy guns, we would have just used sticks and pretended they were guns, so why not pay Mattel to give us better toys so we could save our imagination for other things?

Kids today are so overprotected. How did we survive? I’m sure you’ve seen that email about how tough the people who grew up in the 40s through 60s were, like this and similar ones like this.

The point of these nostalgic rants is that we rode bikes without helmets, rode in cars without seat belts, jumped off roofs, threw rocks at each other, ate Drano and no one died. It’s true! Have you ever read an email called “We didn’t survive” telling about being thrown from a car or being kidnapped and killed while hitchhiking? No. No one is typing blog entries about having their hands blown off or being blinded by firecrackers or being brain damaged by lead paint. If some kid rode his bike without a helmet and fell off, cracking his head open, THEN he got a helmet. And you don’t hear those drooling morons complaining.

We ate off asbestos plates, smoked unfiltered cigarettes at recess and tattooed ourselves with rusty nails dipped in lead-based ink and we all lived. How did we survive? Harry T. Roman got it right in his blog: (link up above) by being Christians.

“Know what else we survived? Having the Bible read to us in class every morning. It produced no religious zealots, or made us “prissies”. It gave us no guilt complexes, nor long-term hang-ups; and none of us had to have remedial time with the school psychologist. It did make us aware of right and wrong; and very few ax murders, drive-by shootings, or drug binges resulted. No rapes, molestations, or other such behavior.”

That’s right, no one was ever raped until they took prayer out of schools.

We survived without email or internet porn; we made do with the underwear ads in the Sears catalog or with the Playboy magazines that Jimmy found in his dad’s closet. We didn’t have “sexting” and crap like that so there weren’t all these teen pregnancies. Parents didn’t have to waste money on cell phones and such and were able to get kids better stuff; like the time Jimmy’s sister got to go on some year long trip, right before their little sister was born.

I miss those days when we could play with guns unattended while our moms smoked and drank. It didn’t hurt us. We survived. What was I saying? Oh yeah, Greenie Stickum Caps. Brings back Good Times. Let me tell you about how we survived...

To hear more about the things we survived, listen to Bill Cosby. If you can get this site to work, click on “The Playground”
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