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from a friend......just thought it kinda fit here.

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 get food poisoning.

My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat a bite raw sometimes, too. Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper, in a brown paper bag, not in icepack coolers, but I can't remember anybody getting e.coli.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.

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 hightop 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.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the National Anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything, and she could even give you an aspirin for a headache or fever.

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 270 digital TV cable stations.

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 (kids liked it better because it didn't sting like iodine did) and then we got our 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.

We didn't act up at the neighbor's house either, because if we did, we got our butt spanked there, and then we got butt spanked again when we got home. I recall Donny Reynolds 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 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 "dysfunctional family". How could we possibly have known 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 ever survive?

Great one Klc!! ahhhh brings back good memories and so very true.

Really, people, where does this artificial nostalgia come from? Good ol' days? People have been suing their neighbors for stupid stuff for decades; it's where a good chunk of our oldest legal precedent comes from. (LaurieMar, remember Garratt v. Dailey (1955) from law school - where the little old lady sued her neighbors when their 5-year-old pulled a chair out from under her as she was getting ready to sit down? ) As late as the mid 70's real property owned by a woman was legally presumed to belong to her husband, even if held in the woman's name. And while there are still problems, anybody remember what it was like to be non-white in this country prior to the civil rights movement? I don't know much about medicine, but I'm willing to bet plenty of people got sick, or worse, from lack of sanitary conditions in the kitchen. Truth is, there are no "good old days." I think Ben Tripp got it right:

"Nostalgia is a fond yearning for times you didn't really live through, or you wouldn't have a fond yearning for them. Perhaps the most seductive and dangerous myth of our times, besides Chupacabra, is the notion of "the good old days". There never were any good old days, and there never will be. Is this a bad thing? No. It's just a reminder that there is only Now, and there was only ever Now, and Now is all there ever will be. Make the most of it while it's here. Americans have forgotten how to Be Here Now, and it's half the reason we're in so much trouble today. We have divided into camps based upon which decade we wish to be living in: on the right, the 1950's seem to be pretty popular (and the 1850's, south of the Mason-Dixon Line). On the left, the decade between 1964 and 1974 is a favorite. For myself, there's a ten-year period in the early Holocene Epoch that's calling my name.

"It's a mugs' game, deciding when things were better compared to now. It all comes down to what period your favorite TV show takes place in. There's a very nice young lady down my block that loves 'Little House on the Prairie'. She's seen every episode twenty times. She also lives in a group home, and her ladder does not reach all the way to the roof, if you follow my meaning. To this young lady, the Reconstruction Period is entirely described by the television show. If she could set the clock back to that time, she'd do it in a heartbeat (as would Michael Landon). And within a week of arriving in 1870, my neighbor would be tossed into a mental hospital, endure a hysterectomy, and thereafter would spend the rest of her life sitting by a window wishing she'd been a fan of 'Happy Days'.

"I don't mean to suggest our ideals are formed entirely by television, although they are. What I mean is that society is always recasting its earlier iterations into deliberately nostalgic forms in order to perpetuate itself. Look at the Church and the Garden of Eden. Those were the days! Innovative, forward-looking ideas require change, which is embraced only by children and weirdos. In the conformist 1950's it was all about libertarian cowboys and Indians. Oh, those golden years before modern dentistry! Now that libertines are in control, we gaze yearningly upon those conformist days of the halcyon 1950's. If only we knew then what we know now, it would be now, then. Which of course it was, at the time. The pendulum swings.

"One would think (if one bothered to think at all) that nostalgia was the most harmless of vices, like smoking toasted banana skins. But it is this longing for better, simpler times that has us rattling down the Primrose Path to Perdition. There were never better, simpler times. Life has always been messy, and things change faster than we imagine. Pick a time you'd rather live in: quite aside from the fact that things were far worse than you imagine during that time, also remember the period you're thinking of was bracketed by other, more horrible times. Say your nostalgia is for the Roaring Twenties (let's pretend you're one of the few thousand rich people for whom the Twenties were actually roaring). Before the Twenties we have WWI and the influenza pandemic. After the Twenties we have the Great Depression. We're always on the way back from something ghastly, or on our way toward something worse. At the moment we're experiencing the latter condition. This makes nostalgia especially seductive.

"Nostalgia is dangerous. Nostalgia is the illusion of better times. People have struggled and fought and died every minute of every day since we first became human, or took a different path and became Republicans. There have been moments of relative peace and security, but explosive change has always been on the way (usually in the form of explosions). Better times have to be created Now. It's a struggle that never ends. We spend our lives striving for free public education, or equal rights for all humans, or better cell phone reception in mountainous areas. For a brief, shining moment, we achieve our goals. Better times are ahead. Then other people struggle to reverse these achievements. Why? Because the way things were before was working for them. They're nostalgic for the good old days. It's the curse of mankind: if we had the chance to do it all over again, we would."

Okay, that's my middle of the night rant for the weekend - as you were, or wish you had been...

What on earth are you doing up at this time of night . . thinking such big thoughts?

Ben pretty much has it right, LA

Ain't Google grand??? No doubt all you old farts wish you had it back in the old days.


Ahh, what would the weekend be if we had no middle-of-the-nights rants??

Great Rant, Law, and perhaps valid information, but I think the "good ole' days" stems from being children, innocent, without the hassles of having to work and scrape for a living. Mom and dad were typically together, and provided us with what ever we needed, and we didn't know the heartaches of civil rights, poor hygiene, foreclosures, and legal battles. If they were happening, we were shielded from it. Our most immediate desperate need was permission to stay out later than 8:00, be able to ride our bikes where ever we wanted to without being afraid of being abducted, and staying at our friends house and giggling under the covers for most of the night. Having dad take only YOU to the store with him, and buying you a coke and a bag of chips, and telling you to hurry up and finish them before you get home so Mom and your siblings wouldn't know (knowing full well he did the same thing with them). It was just easier times, filled hopefully with love and togetherness. Yes, TV had a hand in helping to form these memories, but then, we ALL had to watch TV together, because we only had one set in the house. Now, everyone goes their seperate ways, so there isn't much family time. I'm sure this wasn't true for everyone, but we have a way of forgetting or burrying the hard times, and relishing the good times, holding them up as a standard, hoping that we could somehow re-create it in our present life. Today we have so much turmoil and responsibility in our lives, way more than we did then. That is what makes "good ole days" for most of us. WE know the there were problems back then, but it's better for the soul to dwell on the good things, instead of the bad. And, thank goodness there are good people now, like yourself, who go to bat for the deserving, and are helping make this the "good ole days" for our futures.

Sun&Sand, I certainly understand your comments and if that was your childhood, you are fortunate indeed. That wasn't the case for most people (including me) no matter what the era. Personally, I always wanted to be June Cleaver.
I think Ben Tripp is correct, deluding outselves into thinking there were good ol' days can be really dangerous and we run the risk of becoming complacent.
Oh, and klc, no Google for me. Check out the website www.counterpunch.org It's certainly more left leaning than I am, but Tripp is one of the "moderates" there. I've been reading him for a couple of years now - great stuff!

yup I know "counterpunch". Came across it some time ago. Fell off the radar...thanks for bringing it to the fore.

How would you have handled Eddie Haskell?

Oh, I think Wally did a pretty good job of that, to the extent it could be done.
Truth is for the Eddie Haskell's of the world the only real hope is that they'll grow up and get some good therapy!

Yah, therapy was a closet solution back then!