How is this possible

How did I ever survive? In the current ways of thought, I should have never made it past the first year or two of life. How, in this overly safety conscious atmosphere did we progress as a country into this age. We travel safely by air, and on super highways, at speeds in excess of 45 miles per hour and we still survive. We can fly out of Los Angeles and arrive in New York on the same day we departed. Of course we can't smoke in the plane anymore, due to the nature of second hand smoke as determined by the safety gurus. They're even trying to make it illegal to smoke in your own car, that should make travel by car completely safe.

As a child I rode in a car without a child's safety seat. The nearest thing to a seat was a contraption that hung across the seat back with a plastic steering wheel for the toddler's amusement. Nothing that would have held the kid in a strapped down condition. Most of the time I was held in my mother's lap while we traveled. That would be a serious crime these days.

My mother and father both smoked, even during my mother's pregnancy and myself and my siblings all made it without any physical abnormalities. How can this be possible?

I spent my pre-teen years cruising around on my bicycle and never heard of a bicycle helmet. I fell off the things quite frequently and still never suffered any brain damage or broken limbs etc. A lot of the time we didn't even have chain guards and had to roll our right pant leg up to keep it out of the chain and sprocket. How utterly dangerous? We also rode friends around usually with the friend sitting on the handlebars, without a helmet of course!

Some of the guys had bb guns, and of course everybody had cap guns. I think in today's climate that would just about be a felony. We played Cowboys and Indians and I don't remember anybody ever thinking that it'd be cool to actually shoot a real person. It was fantasy, and the way kids amused themselves before the days of video games and computers. Cap guns were sold in stores and complete cowboy outfits were sold, holsters, guns, chaps, hats and all. I remember my parents getting me a Hop-Along-Cassidy outfit for Christmas one year, seeing how he was my boyhood idol on television. Boy would that be a serious no no these days.

In school I remember we started the class with a short prayer that never offended anyone, and we all made it through the day. We actually learned things in our classes and were afraid of flunking. In those days you didn't go on to the next semester unless you passed. It wasn't about making the students feel good, it was about learning and the good feelings came from the sense of accomplishment of mastering your lessons. The school's had no security guards then and we knew if we misbehaved the teacher would come down on us with no mercy. Of course none of us ever found out what that would be like cause we knew you just never defied the teacher.

Our parents weren't looked at as ogres if they paddled our behinds when we didn't obey them. It was just a discipline thing borne out of love for us. My mother was the executer of punishment in our household and I sure was afraid of getting on the wrong side of her, all 4'11” of her. I was of course never hit with anything other than her hand, and never anywhere but on my backside but it was the fear thing. My father never hit me on the backside, or anywhere. He had the look though. It was the look that kept me in line. One look and my behavior was adjusted immediately. I never pushed the issue to see if there was anything beyond the “look”.

We didn't spend our time staring at a television for days on end. We found things to do outside in the fresh air such as playing baseball, or flying kites which we usually built ourselves. I never remember being bored with nothing to do. You found things to do. Most of my life was spent in the country and we used our creativeness to keep ourselves amused and interested.

In our teen years we built and worked on hot rod cars. It was always important who had the fastest car, and the most knowledge about how to make that car fast. We even raced each other on the country road at night, with even some of the local police as spectators. They knew we were out to be competitive between ourselves and not trying to terrorize the neighborhood. I can remember driving down the Congress Street Expressway at 1 or 2 in the morning at 120 to 130 miles per hour, not really a very smart thing to do but boy what a rush.

We survived it all without all the overdone warnings, all the signs to tell us what would happen if we climbed a ladder wrong, or stood on the wrong step, or how to plug an appliance in, or not to eat the desiccant in a bag of beef jerky. How did we do it without all the over cautious do-gooders that we have in the world today? With all the perfect world people watching over us, how is it that there's more accidents, more shootings, and more crime than at anytime in our history.

Our more simple and wholesome times of several decades ago seemed to be much safer and saner than the way things are these days.