THOSE WERE THE DAYS
Heard a Doctor on TV recently
(Norman Swan on ABC) telling us
that we needed children to play in
the dirt with their dogs and cats and
be allowed to build up some
immunity! Well bugger me!
Who would have thought?
Those were the days - A Bit of Australian Nostalgia!!
My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs, and spread butter,
lard, dripping etc., or bread on the same cutting board with
the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't seem to get
food poisoning. 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
creek, the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine
chlorinated pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then
either?!!
We all took PE... and risked permanent injury with a pair of
Dunlop sandshoes or bare feet, if you couldn't afford the
runners instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with
air cushion soles and built-in light reflectors that cost as
much as a small car.
I can't recall any injuries, but they must have happened
because they tell us how much safer we are now.
We got the cane or the strap for doing something wrong at
school, they used to call it discipline... yet we all grew up to
accept the rules and to honour and respect those older than
us.
We had at least 40 kids in our class and somehow, we all
learned to read and write, do math’s and spell almost all the
words needed to write a grammatically correct letter...
FUNNY THAT!!
We all said prayers in school irrespective of our religion,
sang the national anthem and saluted the Flag and no one
got upset. Staying in detention after school netted us all
sorts of negative attention we wish we hadn't got.
And we all knew we had to accomplish something before
we were allowed to be proud of ourselves.
I just can't recall how bored we were without computers,
Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable
stations. We weren't!! Don’t even mention about the rope
swing into the river or climbing trees, or Heaven forbid
"Billy Carts"?)
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 never needed to get into group therapy and/or 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?
