In Which I Answer an Email Inbox Clogger Regarding "The Good Ol' Days"(T. Scheisskopf)
If you are on the Intert00bZ and have an email account, there is one thing certain and two things sure: sooner or later, you are gonna get one of those right-wing-generated emails. They are generally chocka-block full of lies, half-truths or near-decompensational fantasies, some about the past. I got one today, and the usual part about how, in the "old days" giving kids a beating was just what the doctor ordered, set me off and made my teeth itch. So, I took the time to deconstruct and answer this piffle. Your mileage may well vary. Just remember: anyone who pines for "the good old days" probably wasn't there.
{xtypo_quote} 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.{/xtypo_quote}
Well, chicken farms were completely different things back then. They were generally small, run by proud families who worked very hard to keep the coops clean and the livestock healthy. Now, they are raised in huge factory farms where diseases can run rampant and the FDA rarely inspects. The chickens, like all our livestock back then, were not fed a diet that was heavily-laced with antibiotics, as they are today, which has resulted in strains of infections that are resistant to most, if not all, antibiotics. The same can be seen in our hospitals today: they are having a terrible time with post-op infections of methecyllin-resistant stapholycoccus aurelius (MRSA) and vancomycin-resistant strains of the same. These are our two most powerful antibiotics and they are not working. The reason? Over-prescribing of antibiotics, especially for colds, where antibiotics are proven to be completely ineffective, except for a small placebo affect.
{xtypo_quote} My Mom used to defrost hamburger on the counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes, too. 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.{/xtypo_quote}
Sure, so did I. I loved raw hamburger. Back then, Food Safety was a big priority for our government. That said, I would not eat any raw meat today. Not because I have become some namby-pamby panty waist. Hell, I will eat some things, with relish, that would make the average person run screaming for the exits(Sea Urchin Ovary Sushi, anyone?). That said, the same things that affect the chicken industry are extant in the meat industry. The allowing of "downer" cattle to be slaughtered, butchered and sold(Downers can, and often are, infected with BSE. You might know that as "Mad Cow Disease). Antibiotics are used all to much in feedstocks(along with garbage, plastic pellets and yes, even reclaimed manure), all in the effort to boost the bottom line. Once again, the FDA rarely inspects and even more rarely enforces food safety rules. Remember: A big, profit-driven company will never have the same sense of pride and responsibility in their animal product and how it made it to the food chain, as the smaller livestock farmer of the past. These were proud, hard-working men, who took seriously their responsibility to those who would be consuming their livestock.
That all said, if you are getting your panties in a wad about ice packs in lunch boxes, your must be quite the drab and dreary life, no? Kicking the dog just doesn't give you the same satisfaction these days, does it?
{xtypo_quote} Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.{/xtypo_quote}
We didn't have the amount of development back then, which meant we did not have the septic and sewage runoff. People also did not dump tons of fertilizers and other chemicals on their lawns, every week, back then. That said, I do remember people going swimming in lakes and pools and getting impetago. Usually caused by some of the factors above.
I also remember the river I grew up on becoming completly choked with weeds, because people were dumping raw sewage and fertilizers into it, either from runoff or cussedness.
Today, that same river is clear, it has been designated a wild river, with a development buffer around it and they are tearing the dams out of it.
Nothing wrong about getting smarter.
{xtypo_quote} The term cell phone would have conjured up a phone in a jail cell, and a pager was the school PA system.{/xtypo_quote}
Note: Cell Phones are a tool of Satan, a tether to your job. Is it any wonder people jump and flinch when they go off? I feel that the only thing a cell phone is good for is testing sledgehammers or measuring terminal velocities and their effects from tall objects.
{xtypo_quote} 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. {/xtypo_quote}
That's fashion. I imagine you could still take gym in a pair of Chuck's. If not, then the school board needs a stearn talking to. As for wearing them the rest of the time, well, that's fashion and comfort. And their design is a lot better for your feet, overall. And the reflectors? Yeah, it was much better when kids got run down by cars at night, wasn't it? Keep the herd thinned and all that.
Tell me, do you mourn the times when the best part of gym, for some folks, was whensome poor, hapless geek was getting his head shaved and thrust into a well-used toilet, or beaten up and jammed into a locker? Good times, huh? Or were you one of those guys who could never explain why, when it came time to change, he invariably had an erection? Not that there's anything wrong with that...
{xtypo_quote} Flunking gym was not an option even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.{/xtypo_quote}
No, but thanks to "No Child Left Behind", every aspect of a child's school experience has now been assigned a metric and is tested several times a year. This leaves teachers in a position where they no longer impart knowledge and understanding, but have to teach the children to prepare them for the NCLB standardized tests. Even in Gym.
It is no wonder that other countries are eating our educational outcomes lunch. All our kids are learning is how to take tests.
{xtypo_quote} Speaking of school, we all said prayers and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention. {/xtypo_quote}
Well, Big Fargin' Deal on that. So what? Even with that, I remember school as a pretty brutish and nasty place. On the other hand, I think that rather than worrying about morals of the kids, since morals is pretty much the transactions between you and you God, they might want to bring back some classes in Ethics. Ethics are the rules for interactions between you and me, and you don't have to be a genius to see that ethics these days...suck. Abysmally suck. Also, it might be a good time to bring back Civics. You know, how our country works and is supposed to work. As I see it, too many people have been getting their civics lessons from people like Hannity, Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Beck and Savage, to name a few, and the result is that they really don't know merde about how our country, states, counties and municipalities really work, or are supposed to, when things are being run correctly. A civics class would also include education in The Bill of Rights, Amendments and how our country is designed to deal with both the majority and the minority. Maybe some education on how our country has thrived on a diversity of political philosophies, another part of its design.
{xtypo_quote} We must have had horribly damaged psyches. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. {/xtypo_quote}
I remember one I had who kept a bottle for a wee nip, should she need to fortify herself. But the hat sure was something.
Errm...No nurses wear caps on the floor these days.
But nurse's hats? Oh my.
{xtypo_quote} I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.{/xtypo_quote}
So you came up with this? Go on. Quit it.
Look, school is such a vicious, nasty place, full of little monsters that gang up on certain kids and treat them like garbage, you kinda have to teach them some pride in who they are. At least give them a few years of that, before they enter the workforce, learn the realities of our working and economic system(rather than the illusions they have been sold in school) and lose all self-respect and pride in themselves. Don't begrudge them a few innocent years before the whip-hand of Corporate America strips them of all of their humanity and sense of self.
{xtypo_quote} 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! {/xtypo_quote}
And you wrote and disseminated this on a computer, sir? Have you ever considered a career as a manure spreader?
Oh, here's a beating with a clue stick: Some people are allergic to bee stings and the Benadryl pen keeps them from choking to death. My brother was allergic to bee stings, way back when. We almost lost him once.
But I get your point: Nothing toughens the little bastards up like dying.
{xtypo_quote} 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. {/xtypo_quote}
And the case gets thrown out of court because the kids were trespassing on a clearly-marked construction area.
See above about the incidence of unnecessary antibiotic use and bounce that off the incidence of MRSA in the general population. You see, they say we live in a "different world" because this is a different world. Things have changed. Change is the natural order of things. Do try to keep up. Which might be a bit hard because your mom used a lot of Mecurochrome on you, which is made from Mercury. Which provides a lot of answers.
{xtypo_quote} 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. {/xtypo_quote}
Ahhhhhh, yes. Corporal punishment. Beat the kids around and they will turn out OK. Nothing sets a kid more right than a good knuckle sandwich.
I knew a kid who lived in a house like that. His name was Felix. Very small in stature. Pasty complexion. Lots of bruises. Turned out that Felix, when he got home from school, was immediately locked in a dark closet, the door only opened to give him his regular peanut butter sandwich or to be let out so his father, mother or sister could beat on him, with fists, feet, belts or any object they could grab. The school authorities knew about it but did nothing. Back then, they were loathe to involve themselves in "family affairs".
Then there was Linda. Stunningly attractive. Lived with her mother and step-father. Step-father beat her and physically threatened, even with guns, young males who showed interest in Linda. Nothing ever happened because step-father was a Medal-of-Honor winner. Guadalcanal, IIRC. Lost a hand. Found out a few years later that the cause of Step-fathers jealousy was the fact that he was taking his "advantages" with Linda.
I have many more stories just like this. Many more. Ahhh...the good ol' days. Yessir, you cannot beat 'em. Discipline!
On the other hand, if any neighbor had laid a hand on me or my brother, my mother would have grabbed her stoutest wooden spoon and gone and sorted that neighbor out. As she should have.
{xtypo_quote} 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. {/xtypo_quote}
Perhaps, she, too, knew Donny was an idiot? Just a thought.
We had one like that in our neighborhood. Eddie. Eddie went from riding Stingray bikes recklessly, to riding motorcycles(sometimes fueled with nitromethane) on the street and off-road, recklessly, to taking all manner of drugs recklessly to working on a turret lathe recklessly, thus divesting himself of the better part of two fingers. His grandmother summed it up neatly: "The problem with our Edward is that he is a complete idiot with too many hormones". Grandmothers tend to be quite wise.
{xtypo_quote} 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? We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac! {/xtypo_quote}
Nope, there were no words for such a thing. Social Psychology didn't start until after WWII and even then, it takes quite a number of years for such information to become accepted withing the wider scientific and medical communities. Not that there wasn't such a thing as "dysfunctional" back then. I outlined two dysfunctional families above, and was reminded of another:
There was this family down the highway. Dad, mom, 2 boys, 2 girls. Dad was a big old drunk. Loved his whiskey so much he made his own, too. Mom was beaten a lot, as were the kids. The boys told me they regularly had they way with their sisters, because the father did as well. Life in the country, you know? Would you call this a functional family unit? Note: The authorities knew about them as well. Nothing was ever done. At least until the father and the boys went on their crime spree, stealing from houses in the area. Remember: the phrase "It's a family thing" was very important back then. Lots of people got away with much, by virtue of that phrase.
And no, back then, there was no prozac or other SSRI's, just Chloral Hydrate,Thorazine, stellazine and mellaril, which turned people into zombies with protruding tongues and other signs of Tardive Dyskenesia. Back then, they also pulled all their teeth, gave them colostomys and hysterectomys, too, because all were blamed for "focal sepsis" and considered the cause of all the problems. That continued up until the 50's. The forced sterilizations went on longer. So people drank a lot to make themselves feel better, like that worked peachy. Or, like my friend Sharon, who drove her car under a tractor trailer truck. Or the guy who did the same, in front of my house, with 35 gallons of gasolene wired up under the hood of his pickup. Or Stewey, also from an abusive family, who barricaded himself in a house with 50 weapons, including a .45 caliber, full-auto Thompson sub-machine gun and had a shootout with the cops. Until he stuck that shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger. Or Kingy, who came back from The Nam and proceeded to start drinking, not stopping until he froze to death in the snowdrift he passed out into. Or Bob, who pretty much did the same thing for the same reason, The Nam, but he went out more colorfully: he loaded up his van with gas and went headon into a van with a family in it. They died too.
Somehow, I think all would have been better off, in the long run, with medication and therapy. I know that hapless family would have been.
I sometimes wonder how ANYONE could write something as pig-stupid as the original piece and then send it out to the Internet. Them I pick up a newspaper and read the letters to the editor, or I listen to NJ 101.5, or Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage or any of the others and I know:
If pig-stupid was an energy source, we could heat and light the world for free and run all the cars and trucks. But I figure that these days, choosing to be dumber than a ditch carp is a coping skill. It has to be. It's the only explanation for why I see so much of it.
- CreatedThursday, June 26, 2008
- Last modifiedWednesday, November 06, 2013
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