Days of Black and White TV

I just came across this although this is an American, it totally described my childhood to a 'T.' Hope you enjoy it.

Black and White TV (Under age 40? You won't understand.) You could hardly see for all the snow, Spread the rabbit ears as far as they go. Pull a chair up to the TV set, 'Good Night, David. Good Night, Chet.'

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. 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.

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 P A system.

We all took gym, not P E...and risked permanent injury with a pair of daps (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 P E 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.

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 Stations, 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 .49 cents 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 our 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 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! How did we ever survive?

TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA. AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING!

You sure you didn't live in MY neighbourhood when growing up Toey? Sounds just like it was for me too, come to think of it, we still have a few of those things now. It's only because we live a million miles from nowhere that we still do.
I've got a song for you just along these lines, normally for the Video forum but fits well here.

WOW!! I really love the message and the vibe of this post topic, even though we're showing our age. Some of my childhood memories go back to catholic primary school at Good Counsel in Cairns being taught by the sisters of absolutely no mercy!! We had good manners beaten into us from grade 1-4, then I went to St Augustines marist brothers college where we graduated from the cain, to the cain AND anything else that was handy to beat us with.

These days those good-willed teachers would be in prison serving lengthy sentences and I would have NO EDUCATION, A STINKING BAD ATTITUDE, NO MANNERS, NO MORALS AND be sharing cells with those same teachers from time to time as I did an Aussie Tour of correctional facilities!! OK I may have been in prison, but it certainly wasn't on account of my upbringing and most of those things Toey mentioned, I loved growing up with!!

What a privelige to see how technology has evolved and changed our world for the better AND how social values, laws around child rearing, schooling, safety etc, has done its best to TOTALLY screw up the world as we know it!! Lets go back to dangerous monkey bars in playgrounds, REAL punishment where and when its due, rewards for the same AND good old-fashioned common sense. Maybe then people in this day and age will grow up knowing how to behave AND take care of themselves AND others. NOT expect 'the system' to do everything for them!!!