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DogDragon
13 Aug 2006, 3:35am
If you over forty you'll agree with this. I found it and well' I.m not saying.
But, I'm over forty.


When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning . . . uphill BOTH ways . .
. through year 'round blizzards. Carrying their younger siblings on their backs . . . to their one-room schoolhouse, where they maintained a Straight-A average, despite their full- time, after-school job at the local textile mill . . . where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm over the ripe old age of forty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today. You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today you don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalog!!

There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter . . . with a pen! Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there!

There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ'd usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

And talk of about hardships? You couldn't just download xxx! You had to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options!

We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, a collections agent - you just didn't know!!!
You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!
And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died!! Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there no such thing as stadium seating!
All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no onscreen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little brats!

And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove or go build a frigging fire. Imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid Jiffy Pop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot. That's exactly what I'm talking about!
You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled.

You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1970!!!!!

Missileman
13 Aug 2006, 3:57am
And then there are those of us a little past um.....ah.......50 who didn't have calculators, but could run 4 decimal places on a slide rule.

Didn't have color TV let alone HD TV.

Listened to the radio dramas like "The Shadow", "Jack Benny", etc....

Cars wore out at 30K miles and tires were only good for 5-8K miles. And 10 miles to the gallon was an economy car.

I also used to use a horse team on the farm in the winter (only on warm days above 40 below).

Young people are so unappreciative of how easy they have it.

I won't go in to using an outhouse as it might make some young ones faint of stomach :) I know remembering the smell still bothers mine.

airbornflght
13 Aug 2006, 4:30am
But yet again, it is thinking. We believe that we should move up a little bit from our parents standards and each time each generation should do a little better.

If you look at it, each generation has progressively done better. Hell, they used to have to use a horse and buggy. and fancy running water, WHAT!, and you better go out and dig a hole for the outhouse, we have to move it today, the **** hole is full.

Each generation has done better. When I was eight years old, I didnt have a cell phone, they were just getting popular, I wouldnt have dreamed of having one, I see kids now that have their own computers, nah, we had a family computer. I know my complaints may seem pathetic compared to the period that you grew up in, but I have accepted the fact that each generation most likely is gonna do a little better, but along with that, more rules/laws will limit the generation.

When you 40 year old guys were young, you had kickass fireworks like cherry bombs, silver salutes, blockbusters...when I was young, I had a paper chicken that shot fire out its ass.

Now, I used to make my own flashpowder and assemble my own large firecrackers, and I had fun, most kids didnt, but I have had to stop, as it has recently become illegal thanks to our friends at the government. and flash powder is now considered a high explosive, and unless I have a BATF license to manufacture it, and if I did, my ass could go to jail. They say it is because of terrorism, I say bs, because any terrorist with 1/100000th a brain would know that fertilezer and diesel is cheaper and easier to get a hold of...that is just one example of rules being imposed as the years go on, there isnt much that can be done about it. You may have used to do prank phone calls, kids still do, but if you piss of the wrong person, they'll call the cops, and the cops will deem that verbal harassment.

I bet you twenty years down the road, my kids will have crap I never even dreamed of, as well as have rules imposed on them that I can do nothing but enforce to keep them out of trouble. example being my dad used to do a bunch of crazy stuff, but he wont let me do it because of the trouble that I can get into doing it in this day and age.

This all seems to be a double edged sword to me, hell, I love my internet and computer, but I would also like to live in the society from the 60's, will that happen? hell no. Everytime technology gets better, society seems to get worse, but maybe it is just more of the bad people are being exposed when they werent in previous years. and as always, the grass seems greener on the other side of the fence doesnt it?

bothered
13 Aug 2006, 8:30am
I agree with you airborn, I have always thought there was a kind of 'level' between positive and negative benifits for all the stuff we have that maintains itself just below 'content'. Like TV, before TV people had to entertain themselves or even talk to each other. TV maybe more entertaining but many people just don't talk like they used to. Are we any happier nowadays? I doubt it, we just have more stuff.

Nomad
13 Aug 2006, 8:53am
And then there are those of us a little past um.....ah.......50 who didn't have calculators, but could run 4 decimal places on a slide rule.

There are those of us who took Calculus I & II without a calculator, and trust me, the stuff they do now is much more difficult than back in the '70s or before.

I'd have to agree with ABN though, each generation must progress. It is a necessity that they do so in order to maintain our lives. Stagnation never much pleased anything but extinct species. We will perpetually survive, adapt, simplify, etc.

I doubt many people know how to hunt an animal and cook it either, let alone what parts are good. However, this was a skill that was quite common around a hundred years ago; now it belongs to outdoorsy types and rural areas (Bothing dying breeds, for better or for worse).

People from the '60s, '70s, and '80s to a degree lived in a much different time than we do today. The relative contemporary uncertainty in American life pales in comparison with that of world in previous decades. However, does that undermine my generation? The fact we have no great cause, no crusade, no 'heroic' war to distinguish this batch of young men and women from the previous, is that good or bad?

I think the age gap between generations brings perspective into life, and it is to a degree a double-edged sword, but I do not think it is a sword to be afraid of for the most part.

DogDragon
13 Aug 2006, 11:09am
Everytime technology gets better, society seems to get worse, but maybe it is just more of the bad people are being exposed when they werent in previous years. and as always, the grass seems greener on the other side of the fence doesnt it?[/QUOTE]

Ok, I have to give it to abf.
I think he's right,When I went to school and you got someone one pissed at you
you just met after school and punched it out.
Now they go home and get a gun so things are changing and back in the day if you went out to at night to have some (how should I put this) fun.
You blew up a mail box or went to the graveyard and drank not shoot up a street or beat a homeless person.
So yeah things are changing,I just don't think technology is the blame.

airbornflght
13 Aug 2006, 5:49pm
I'd have to agree with ABN though, each generation must progress. It is a necessity that they do so in order to maintain our lives. Stagnation never much pleased anything but extinct species. We will perpetually survive, adapt, simplify, etc.

I agree with that 100% when I took biology, it was really a class on evolution, and a little bit on DNA, but we learned that almost any specie that didnt change and adapt would be extinct in an in determinant amount of time. One of the cooler things I learned in that class was that a giraffe used to be this size of a small horse, but as its food source started to be higher and higher, only the ones with the longer necks continued to survive and reproduce, and there you have the modern giraffe.

MrBill
14 Aug 2006, 3:32am
Sounds pretty accurate DogDragon. However, I wouldn't trade growing up in the 60' - 70's to be a kid in today's world....no thanks! The kids today may have more "gadgets", but it's not as safe. :(

airbornflght
14 Aug 2006, 4:57am
Sounds pretty accurate DogDragon. However, I wouldn't trade growing up in the 60' - 70's to be a kid in today's world....no thanks! The kids today may have more "gadgets", but it's not as safe. :(

I survived.:rockon:

profdlp
14 Aug 2006, 3:08pm
...I wouldn't trade growing up in the 60' - 70's to be a kid in today's world....no thanks! The kids today may have more "gadgets", but it's not as safe. :(
You know what I find funny? While I agree with you wholeheartedly, I remember all the fears that parents had for their kids in those days, and that it surely seemed like the human race was on the brink of extinction.

We were all expected to:


Die in a nuclear holocaust
Get LSD-laced candy from hippies due to the explosion of drug use
Catch syphilis from hippies due to the advent of "free love"
Starve to death due to global shortages of food
Fall prey to teh ghey
End up working for the Japanese, who were buying the whole damn country
Start playing soccer (they were right about this one...)
Become a nation of retards from watching the idiot box too much (right again)
Adopt the Designated Hitter rule (half right)
Freeze to death during the coming new ice age
Etc, etc, etc...


I'd have to say that I've seen a lot of surprising things in my life, most of them falling into the category of "inevitable" events which never came to pass.