HOW DID WE SURVIVE??
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 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 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 offer14 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 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 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. 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 John Davis 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 firkin survive? Geeez !!!!!!!!!
Thé Mulindwas Communication Group
"With Yoweri Museveni and Dr. Kiiza Besigye Uganda is in anarchy"
Kuungana Mulindwa Mawasiliano Kikundi
"Pamoja na Yoweri Museveni na Dk. Kiiza Besigye Uganda ni katika machafuko"
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