Thinking

So.

Someone close to me sent me this chain spam email:-

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WE WAS BRUNG UP PROPER !

"And we never had a whole Mars bar until 1993"!!!
CONGRATULATIONS TO ALL MY FRIENDS WHO WERE BORN IN THE 1930's 1940's, 50's, 60's and early 70's !
First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they carried us and lived in houses made of asbestos...
They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer.
Then after that trauma, our baby cots were covered with bright coloured lead-based paints.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets or shoes, not to mention, the risks we took hitchhiking.
As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
Take away food was limited to fish and chips, no pizza shops, McDonalds , KFC, Subway or Nandos...
Even though all the shops closed at 6.00pm and didn't open on a Sunday, somehow we didn't starve to death!
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this.
We could collect old drink bottles and cash them in at the corner store and buy Toffees, Gobstoppers, Bubble Gum and some bangers to blow up frogs with.
We ate cupcakes, white bread and real butter and drank soft drinks with sugar in it, but we weren't overweight because........
WE WERE ALWAYS OUTSIDE PLAYING!!
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. And we were O..K.
We would spend hours building our go-carts out of old prams and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. We built tree houses and dens and played in river beds with matchbox cars.
We did not have Playstations, Nintendo Wii , X-boxes, no video games at all, no 999 channels on SKY,
no video/dvd films, no mobile phones, no personal computers, no Internet or Internet chat rooms..........WE HAD FRIENDS and we went outside and found them!
We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and there were no Lawsuits from these accidents.
Only girls had pierced ears!
We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever.
You could only buy Easter Eggs and Hot Cross Buns at Easter time...
We were given air guns and catapults for our 10th birthdays,
We rode bikes or walked to a friend's house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or just yelled for them!
Mum didn't have to go to work to help dad make ends meet because we didn’t need to keep up with the Jones’s!
Not everyone made the rugby/football/cricket/netball team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment. Imagine that!! Getting into the team was based on MERIT
Our teachers used to hit us with canes and gym shoes and throw the blackboard rubber at us if they thought we weren’t concentrating ..
We can string sentences together and spell and have proper conversations because of a good, solid three R’s education.
Our parents would tell us to ask a stranger to help us cross the road. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.    They actually sided with the law!
Our parents didn't invent stupid names for their kids like 'Kiora' and 'Blade' and 'Ridge' and 'Vanilla' and 'Tiger'
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL !
And YOU are one of them!
CONGRATULATIONS!
You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.   And while you are at it, forward it to your kids so they will know how brave their parents were.
PS -The big type is because your eyes are not too good at your age anymore

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Clearly awful. 

Simple Interweb research shows its been wandering around the worst parts of the net (dailymail dot co dot uk, mobilehomes dot narrow minded for you  dot org) since the middle of 2009.  Still I felt I had to reply. 

You must. 

I wrote this quickly.  It could easily be improved....

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Sorry to be boring, but before we go overboard with this ridiculous rant, we need to remember:-


Many people didn’t survive their childhoods – infant mortality has reduced by 75% since 1960.  That’s due to lots of causes, including better care and more intervention. And the rate of infant deaths is still dropping.


The bone deformity, rickets, was still prevalent in the 40s – and much higher than now, despite the badly-researched recent scare stories.


Lots of children were chronically deprived, and with poor diets.


Polio has been fought and eliminated in Europe, we no longer put sufferers in iron lungs and children rarely grow up crippled as a result, unlike in the past.


Yes almost everyone smoked. And lots of those people now have horrible lung or heart diseases, or have suffered amputation – if they have lived this long. And children couldn’t avoid the smoke in public places. Secondary smoking is a killer too.


And lead-based paints (and lead piping) can cause severe mental illnesses – which surely ought not to be celebrated?


As for: "They took aspirin, ate blue cheese, raw egg products, loads of bacon and processed meat, tuna from a can, and didn't get tested for diabetes or cervical cancer."?


I find this sentence quite confusing. It lumps together so many things. Not being tested for an illness (and hence not being able to stop it early) is surely nothing to be pleased about.  We ought instead to celebrate the fact that the tests are now available, along with treatment.


The list of things to avoid sounds like a list of so many tabloid-ese scare stories about what you should and shouldn’t eat. The Daily Mail oncology ontology. It is miles away from what a sensible (science-based) nutritionist would focus on. Aspirin, aspirin?  Yes, aspirin taken too much can cause severe stomach illnesses (as it did to a good friend of mine’s mum in the 60s – she got very poorly) – so now pharmacists ask more questions and pay more attention to dosages. A wholly good thing.


I despair, sometimes, that the number of deaths and injuries from avoidable accidents in the past – that used to happen in factories and other workplaces, as well as public spaces – before the work of the trades unions and others helped to establish the need for laws that protected people - get totally lost in ranting about ‘Health and Safety gone mad’.


Seat belts and air bags have saved many lives. Adults and children. Don’t celebrate the fact that people died in the past when they didn’t wear them – be pleased that we have them and use them now!


When asked the reasons – and lots of work has been done on this – the main reason that parents say their kids don’t play out is the traffic (at least in cities, where most of us live nowadays). We have all become petrolheads.


People who want to ‘go back to the past’ will rarely give up their cars. The evidence is clear – kids started playing out less a long time before the computer games arrived in every household.


We did have better public transport in the past, that is true in the main – and we had far fewer cars. So if you care about this, you personally can do something to fix it. Stop driving. Encourage others to do the same.


There’s another thing about friendship, tho’. With the social networks, you can find like-minded friends – pursue interests that are different. You aren’t forced just to be friends with those nearby – neighbours and so forth. Ideally, friendships based on belief and shared interests rather just proximity.  Much better...


The idea of ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’ comes from 1916, from clear evidence. But the notion of Mum ‘not needing to go to work’ ignores the large number of women who want to work, earn and see themselves as equal to men – in that past, many women were told to leave their jobs when they got married. Teachers too.  We should praise and celebrate feminism, not invent falsehoods about an ideal past.

If you grew up poor in the 30s, 40s, 50s and for much of the 60s, your educational opportunities were dramatically reduced. If you wanted to, you couldn’t stay on at school. Most people suffered from being pushed into secondary moderns, rather than the lucky few in grammar schools. A good, solid three ‘R’s education was a pretty damn limited achievement, to be honest – about all you could achieve if you weren’t in the elite. 

The woman who sent me this email was told in the 70's that 'girls aren't good at physics' by her teacher - so she didn't do the subject, tho' she wanted to...  Crap.  The more recent social mobility, based on a dramatically widened educational entitlement, is another thing to celebrate.


And throughout many of those horrible decades, the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s sexual repression was rife.


Homosexuality was illegal. Remember that one of the UK’s greatest mathematicians, Alan Turing, who helped shorten the war by many years and founded modern computer science, was prosecuted and found guilty in 1952 for being gay, underwent chemical castration and finally died in 1954 of cyanide poisoning. Probably suicide. Only in 2009 did the government apologise.


And for every famous person like Turing there were thousands who lived lives of shame, secrecy and repression because of stupid vicious laws and small-minded beliefs. Why shouldn’t anyone who wants them have pierced ears? (For the record I don’t - but I would defend your right).


At the same time, child abuse remained uninvestigated and unchecked. Let’s not be pleased about that, nor about the bullying violence in schools that has now, finally, begun to be sorted out (although admittedly not yet fully).


As with sexuality, so with racism. Oswald Moseley’s blackshirts still find an echo in the BNP scum that remain to haunt us in deprived areas. But we should be proud that we have made (some) steps to stop people being victimised because of their skin colour. Think of all the abusive words that once were used to define people based on race and colour, in the playground and elsewhere. They are thankfully far rarer now.


As for getting into school sports teams “on merit” – why the huge focus on sports, and competitive sports at that? Oh I see – a coded attack on “political correctness” (or whatever chimera the awful, reactionary, tabloid press want to raise up today). For the record: schools still do a lot of competitive sports. Teams are picked on merit. They also do lots of other stuff too – noncompetitive outdoors things and indoor activities. And many of these are judged on merit (maths Olympiad, chess club, debating societies). Sports aren’t everything.


And some children self-select by interest. And sometimes teachers encourage children because it will help them in other areas.


There is really nothing to complain about here.


In summary: Yes there is lots wrong with life today – and for kids in particular. Crap food is still too prevalent amongst the underprivileged. We could take more exercise. We could drive our cars less.  We appear to have surrendered to the worst forms of global capitalism (look at our High Streets, consider our culture). But much is also much that is fantastic today – or at least a huge improvement on the past. Fewer children die, fewer are injured, fewer have debilitating injuries, child abuse has reduced, there is much less smoking, there are laws protecting us from bad employers and unsafe practices, we are no longer prosecuted for not being heterosexual, we are less racist, education is broader and deeper and available for longer to more people. Social mobility has increased. Science is used more and more to improve our diets and everything else about our lives.


So let’s not concentrate upon a golden age of the past - it just didn’t exist.


And anyway, I quite like Nandos.
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So, again.

That's wot I wrote.

Happy to discuss... (smile)