The fall of Western civilization began with the designated hitter rule.
Nothing is more tedious than cliched "Everything was perfect in the good 'ol days" article.
It told the driver that when I started in the selling game, we used to ask cab drivers where the hookers were.
Now we ask them to take us somewhere where you can smoke.
"The game is pastoral, without the limitations of a clock, filled with strategy. Between pitches and innings, there are pauses, time to discuss what happened and what's going on and what might happen next. Uh-uh. Not today. From the moment you enter the park till you stagger away, your senses are assaulted by pounding, deafening-music. The scoreboards are constantly flashing quizzes and various games to attract your attention."
LOL this is where I somewhat disagree (except article did NOT note how disgusting the grandstands have become with foul-loud-mouthed louts filling the stands and gorging on humungous foodstuffs while it spills all over). Baseball is boring, and these modern "intrusions" only try to hide that fact. Oh yeah, it's just GREAT that there's no clock on a baseball game!
"Personally, the greatest difference between life in America today and what it was in the middle of the last century, is when I smiled at a beautiful girl then, very often I was rewarded with a flirtatious response. Now I get a look that says, "Why is that old man staring at me?"
Well, Sid, have you ever considered that you actually are an old man now?
John Adams wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson after both of them were retired lamenting the decline of the next generation. He was sure the country was going to heck in a hand basket.
Well, the next generation included Abraham Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and his own son John Quincy Adams.
But, he was right - just took a couple of hundred more years than he thought.
We're really doing it now.
How did we grow old?
Looking back, it's hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have. 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 were painted with bright 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. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.
We would leave home in the morning and 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, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones or the BB gun was not available.
We were not ridiculed for this play, not thrown out of school, and didn't all grow up as mass murderers. Most of us grew up with guns in the house and rather than being taught to fear them, we were taught to handle and use them responsibly.
We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugar soda, but we were never over-weight; 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.
Some students weren't as smart as others or didn't work hard so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.
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... even for stupid kids! I guess PE must be much harder than gym.
Every year, someone taught the whole school a lesson by running in the halls with leather soles on linoleum tile and hitting the wet spot. 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 (amazing we aren't all brain dead from that), and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for about the next two weeks. We must have had horribly damaged psyches.
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. What an archaic health system we had then. Remember school nurses? Ours wore a hat and everything.
I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself, church was somewhere your friends went on Sunday too (except for the Murdocks down the street, but nobody trusted them anyway),
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, PlayStation, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital cable stations. I must be repressing that memory as I try to rationalize through the denial of the dangers could have befallen us as we trekked off each day about a mile down the road to some guy's vacant 20, 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, letting us play on that lot. He should have been locked up for not putting up a fence around the property, complete with a self-closing gate and an infrared intruder alarm. 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 over the counter mercurochrome and then we got butt-whooped. 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 butt-whooped (physical abuse) there too... and then we got butt-whooped 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 with leaded gas.
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 vacations. I should probably sue the folks now for the danger they put us in when we all slept in campgrounds in the family tent. There was surely a Ho-Jo somewhere nearby that would have been safer.
Summers were spent behind the sickle lawnmower and 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 Johnny 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 pick 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 a dysfunctional family. How could we possibly have know 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!
Times change and they don't always change for the better. Every generation likes to believe that it lives in the best of times, but any student of history sees the falsity of that.
Great site for taking a step back in time: http://www.backwhen.com
Remember when....
You had to depend on Walter Cronkite for your news
Life expectancy was 65, not 80
The Soviet Union had missles pointed at us
You had to make calls from a public phone when away from home
The main mode of cross-country transportation was a train, which took a week, not an afternoon.
I don't listen to the rap stations so I can't speak to the lyrics of todays rap. However, there is plenty of good music being made today and thanks to satellite radio, I have nearly 100 stations of commercial-free music to listen to and yes, some of the stations are dedicated to the oldtime music like Sinatra and Nat King Cole.
Directions can still be gotten from gas station attendants but with navigation systems built into cars and the ability to download driving maps off the Internet, why is it even necessary?
Who cares about going to ballgames when you can TIVO the game and watch it at your own pace in your own home. Try doing that back in the good old 1950s!
1. A cowboy never takes unfair advantage, even of an enemy.
2. A cowboy never betrays a trust.
3. A cowboy always tells the truth.
4. A cowboy is kind to small children, to old folks, and to animals.
5. A cowboy is free from racial and religious prejudice.
6. A cowboy is always helpful, and when anyone's in trouble, he lends a hand.
7. A cowboy is a good worker.
8. A cowboy is clean about his person, and in thoughts, word, and deed.
9. A cowboy respects womanhood, his parents, and the laws of his country.
10. A cowboy is a patriot.
"The gas pump jockey could show you to your destination because he knew the area inside out and backwards.'
Yes, but just how useful was, "You go down the road a ways and turn left where the old schoolhouse used to be."?
IMO, here's the last 50 years in a nutshell. A steady stream of lefty politicians who have brought to pass the Commie dream:
Congressional Record--Appendix, pp. A34-A35
January 10, 1963
Current Communist Goals
EXTENSION OF REMARKS OF HON. A. S. HERLONG, JR. OF FLORIDA
IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES
Thursday, January 10, 1963
Mr. HERLONG. Mr. Speaker, Mrs. Patricia Nordman of De Land, Fla., is
an ardent and articulate opponent of communism, and until recently
published the De Land Courier, which she dedicated to the purpose of
alerting the public to the dangers of communism in America.
At Mrs. Nordman's request, I include in the RECORD, under
unanimous consent, the following "Current Communist Goals," which
she identifies as an excerpt from "The Naked Communist," by Cleon
Skousen:
[From "The Naked Communist," by W. Cleon Skousen]
CURRENT COMMUNIST GOALS
1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic
war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic
war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament [by] the United States
would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist
affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for
war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist
domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of
Khrushchev's promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free
elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United
States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in
progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is
rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with
its own independent armed forces. (Some Communist leaders
believe the world can be taken over as easily by the U.N. as by
Moscow. Sometimes these two centers compete with each other as
they are now doing in the Congo.)
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American
institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for
socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum.
Get control of teachers' associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or
organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments,
editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of
artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to
"eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute
shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms."
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums. "Our plan is to
promote ugliness, repulsive, meaningless art."
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them
"censorship" and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting
pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures,
radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as "normal,
natural, healthy."
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social"
religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual
maturity which does not need a "religious crutch."
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the
schools on the ground that it violates the principle of "separation of
church and state."
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate,
old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to
cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish
aristocrats who had no concern for the "common man."
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching
of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the
"big picture." Give more emphasis to Russian history since the
Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over
any part of the culture--education, social agencies, welfare programs,
mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation
of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social
agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which
no one but psychiatrists can understand [or treat].
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as
a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose
Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity and
easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative
influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding
of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are
legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and
special-interest groups should rise up and use ["]united force["] to
solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are
ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot
prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction [over domestic
problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction] over nations and
individuals alike.
Well, to give you a bit of doggerel,
It was good,
and bad
but it was all we had...
I remember never locking the house- and Dad's Browning autoloader 16 he kept near had something to do with that.
I also took my hunting rifles & shotguns to grade school for show & tell.
One car-
One telephone-
One man worked one job, to support one family-
Collecting refillable Coke bottles for pin money- 25 cents bought lunch-
"White" and "Colored" entrances- and that offended lots of people even then, including myself-
Half-round TV tubes, but a radio in every room people gathered- that was the fast way for news-
Only knew one divorced couple- the local scandal for years-
Rapists got the electric chair, and I'm fairly sure child molesters did too- that was never talked about, though-
It was different, and slower. Not all good- dental work was so agonizing lots of people did without-
A fifty-year old man was old, old- although a few made their 80's and 90's, they were exceptional-
BUMP FOR LATER
I might be the oldest one here....born in 1941.
As I remember it, women had few opportunities. As girls we were encouraged to be nurses, but never doctors. A female doctor had a very tough row to hoe clear up to the late 1960's when I did a survey of female doctors in this city and they related all the problems they encountered - from quotas in college entrance to really vile attitudes of the male students and teachers with whom they had to deal.
Women were encouraged to be teachers...but never school principals, and even the female teachers were mostly in the lower grades. Almost never saw a male teacher until at least middle school.
Women were encouraged to be cooks - but not chefs - where the real money was.
Women were encouraged to be sales clerks - but almost never a sales or store manager.
Women usually did much of the grind work in church/synagogue - but almost never sat on the church/synagogue board, or held an office with real authority.
Women might be elders in a church - but never a pastor, minister, rabbi.
Women were encouraged to be typists, stenographers and secretaries, but not executives, office managers or even head up the typing pool.
Women typed up the insurance endorsements, but were not in sales (where the money was).
Women were encouraged to be legal secretaries, but not lawyers.
Women were encouraged to be bookkeepers, but not accountants.
I don't ever recall seeing a female police officer, EMT, or fire fighter.
Women were pilots who tested military aircraft in the Second World War (and a number lost their lives), but they weren't allowed to fly in anything even approaching combat. And they didn't receive ANY of the military benefits such as burial, or disability, or retirement.
Women who joined the military usually ended up in the typing pool - or a reasonable facsimile thereof.
I remember we were given an occupational questionnaire in middle school that was supposed to "guide" us in making decisions as to what we wanted to do after graduation. The boys' and girls' choices were completely different.
"Doctor," "lawyer," "engineer," "accountant," "president," etc. never appeared on the girls' questionnaire. It did on the boys' questionnaires.
On ours (the girls') I remember "ballerina" "housewife" "mother" "typist" "cook" "housecleaner" "elementary teacher" jobs.
I also remember how blacks were treated...the university at which I worked (large one in Philadelphia) had one ONE black student. One lonely engineering student.
There were plenty of black employees though - but all in the kitchen and the custodial staff. No black teachers or clerical staff. How come? The city has a large black population.
Bell telephone of Pennsylvania never hired Jews. I was twice refused employment in in two different places because I am Jewish. I'm not guessing about this- I was TOLD it to my face.
In 1964, I was "let go" from an executive secretarial position to the manager of a large resort in San Diego because I was six months pregnant. I was told "pregnant women are unsightly." I had just bought a complete maternity wardrobe so I would be "sightly." It wasn't my work, because I was told to come back "afterwards."
On the other hand the worst offense in high school was for someone to get caught smoking a cigarette in the bathroom or for chewing gum in the hall. We had one girl out of a graduating class of over 600 who had to "go on vacation" early. One out of 600. Never even heard of drugs or weapons in school.
There were lots of things that were better 50 years ago - but not all of them.