RE: This time it s true - He finally died...

[wahoonc]

 Acts 2:38 girl
Not my words but somehow appropriate. Mr. Rodgers will be missed in our neighborhood!
 
 Do you remember ?
 
    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.
 
  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  hightop 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
 schoolsystem.
 
  Speaking of school, we all said the pledge and staying in detention
 after school caught all sorts of negative attention. 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.
 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, 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  andpieces 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 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 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) here too ... and then we got 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 truck (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.
 
  Summers were spent behind the push 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 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 survive?
 
 
 Aaron
 
 

[Firefyter-Emt]

 Acts 2:38 girl
AMEN... Aaron!!!!

[mike4947]

 Acts 2:38 girl
A really cute tribute to Mr. Rogers in political cartoons  http://cagle.slate.msn.com/news/MrRogers/main.asp

[Acts 2:38 girl]

 Acts 2:38 girl
Mike - those were awesome!  
 
 I guess we can look at the past from any perspective, better or worse.  I don t want to get down on our society today, because THIS is the time I have to raise my children.  Our kids don t have to wory about things we did as children, and visa-versa.  I m sure if we think hard enough we can remember our parents/grandparents complaining about " kids today"  back in the 50 s and 60 s.  During this glorified time in our childhood, they thought it wasn t so great either!  Just because Mr. Rogers died, doesn t mean a whole way of life has gone by!  There is always someone else to step up to the place and carry on.  And besides, our kids have something that we never had as children - Mr. Rogers re-runs!!  I could get really down on our society if I wanted to, but how does that benefit my children and neighbors?  I think what we really miss about our childhood is the innocents of it all!  No real knowledge of stress, bills, work, perversion, responsibilities,evil, etc.    We knew of these things, but (most of us) had no first hand knowledge.  THAT is what I miss about being a kid!  []  Summer vacation!  Faking sick days - birthday parties - Christmas!  That s what s so great about having kids - being able to glimps at it one more time!