Honey sent this to me and I realized that today was perhaps the best day of all to post it here. It reflects many of my own thoughts about how "new and improved" our lives have become as we slowly yield up Constitutinally guaranteed right after right in the name of making life "better" or "safer." Think about these realities as you read them and see if you can any longer understand why we have done the idiotic things we have done to ourselves over the past half a century plus. What do you think? I am particularly interested in the views of our younger visitors and posters who have never lived with the freedom we once took for granted. Deb, that means you, Roseshadow and Bunnyhunny too.

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 counter AND I used to eat it raw sometimes too, but I can't remember getting E-coli.

As children we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

Our baby cribs, toys and rooms were painted with brightly colored lead-based paint. We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and, when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets and wouldn't have worn them if we did.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We would leave home in the morning and could and would play all day as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt.

We played with toy guns, played cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or my BB gun was not available. Despite this, we were safe in school and on the streets.

At some point in our lives we discovered that boys and girls were different and not exactly the same in all things, but that was not only all right with both boys and girls, it was GREAT!

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter and drank sugar soda, but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. We knew those things happened in real life too and we had to learn to deal with those realities while we were still young. Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work as hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. Those who did not meet minimal expectations either got left behind or they discovered that they had the opportunity to succeed, if they chose to do so. They also had the right to fail, if that was their choice. They learned that it was entirely up to them if they wished to get chosen for the team, make good grades or be accepted by fellow students and no one else had that power over their lives... only them. There were no "social promotions" in those days. Just as in the adult work world, promotions were earned, not handed out in a way that diminished the value of such "promotions" to meaninglessness.

That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers of all times. We had the freedom of failure or success with personal responsibility for our successes or our failures. We learned how to deal with it all without a single lawsuit, protest march, confrontational demand for acceptance or law being passed to change a social system that worked fine as it was.

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), 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 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.

Flunking gym was not an option... not even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.

Every year someone taught the whole school ( and themselves) a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. We didn't need labels warning us not to do that. The clown on crutches was warning enough for most students.

How much better off would we be today if we only knew we could have sued the school system? Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge of allegiance and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for the next two weeks. Those who misbehaved were shunned by almost everyone else, not lionized. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.

I can't understand it. Schools didn't offer 14 year olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn't have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles. Unwed mothers were seen as girls of loose morals and considered pariahs, not candidates for Homecoming or Prom Queen. We still had shame in those days.

What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything. She wouldn't advise you how to go behind your parents' backs to do something. In fact, she would call them if you tried and she found out about it.

We thought that we were supposed to actually accomplish something before we were allowed to be proud of ourselves. Pride was not a meaningless birthright, but the right to attain it through personal accomplishment most certainly was. I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStations, Nintendo, X-boxes, 270 digital cable stations, cell phones and pagers.

I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers that could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant lot, built forts out of branches and pieces of plywood, made trails, and fought over who got to be the Lone Ranger.

What was that property owner thinking by letting us play on that lot? He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the entire property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarms and signs to warn us.

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 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 on his own property 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 (physical abuse) there too... and then we got our butt spanked again when we got home.

Mom invited the door-to-door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough... it wasn't so that they could take the rough berber in the family room) and Dad drove a car that burned leaded gas that cost less than 20-cents a gallon and he got around 20 miles per gallon without spewing nitric acid into the air.

Our music had to be left inside when we went out to play and I am sure that I nearly exhausted my imagination a couple of times when we went on two-week family vacations.

I should probably sue my folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent.

Summers were spent behind the push lawnmower. I didn't even know that mowers came with motors until I was 13 and we got one without an automatic blade-stop or an auto-drive.

How sick were my parents?

Of course my parents weren't the only psychos. 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 his butt 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 a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have known that we needed to get into group therapy?

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac or Ritalin!

How did we survive? How did we manage to build the strongest economy and democratic republic in history, create men and women who made scientific discoveries that doubled life expectancies, improved the quality of life for our citizens and put men on the moon, replacement hearts in chests that were severely diseased and no longer worked? How did we manage to develop computer chips, dialysis machines, antibiotics and medical procedures that gave even the weakest among us a fighting chance at survival? How did we manage to have a government filled with people who placed America and its people above personal party politics? How did we have newspapers and magazines that assiduously attempted to present basic facts, unfetterd by political agenda, and left it to citizens to decide what it meant?

Think about every one of the things mentioned here. All predated a specific period in time... the so-called "enlightened," drug-drenched 1960s and 70s. Our parents and grandparents abdicated to the insanity that was foisted off on us by anti-free-market-economy, socialistic inclined people who shunned everything that had gone before them out of hand. Could we have made many of the strides whe have made since then without destroying the very fabric of our lives and loss of freedoms as we surely have done?

Was their's a wise choice? Are we better off overall? How DID we survive without all the new found "wisdom" that steals more and more of our freedoms every day and murders our young people's potential in the name of "feeling good?"

It seems to me that the real question we ask ourselves ought to be, "How will we survive what we have so foolishly done to ourselves?"

Does anyone have any response to these questions and observations? Perhaps they weren't the "good old days," but they sure beat today's "not so good days."