Recently I received a forwarded e-mail from my daughter. It was titled “If you are 40, or older, you might think this is hilarious!” Well, I did–but likely not in the way that the author (unknown, by the way) thought I might. First I give you the letter. Then I give you my response to it as a 68 year “old fart.”
“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… Barefoot… BOTH ways… yadda, yadda, yadda
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 my 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! Stamps were 10 cents!
Child Protective Services didn’t care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!
There were no MP3′s or Napsters or iTunes! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio, and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We’d play our favorite tape and “eject” it when finished, and then the tape would come undone rendering it useless. Cause, hey, that’s how we rolled, Baby! Dig?
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!
There weren’t any freakin’ cell phones either. If you left the house, you just didn’t make a damn call or receive one. You actually had to be out of touch with your “friends”. OH MY GOSH!!! Think of the horror… not being in touch with someone 24/7!!! And then there’s TEXTING. Yeah, right. Please! You kids have no idea how annoying you are.
And we didn’t have fancy Caller ID either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your parents, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, the collection agent… you just didn’t know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
We didn’t have any fancy PlayStation or Xbox video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like ‘Space Invaders’ and ‘Asteroids’. Your screen 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!
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!!! NO REMOTES!!! Oh, no, what’s the world coming to?!?!
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 rat-bastards!
And we didn’t have microwaves. If we wanted to heat something up, we had to use the stove! Imagine that!
And our parents told us to stay outside and play… all day long. Oh, no, no electronics to soothe and comfort. And if you came back inside… you were doing chores!
And car seats – oh, please! Mom threw you in the back seat and you hung on. If you were lucky, you got the “safety arm” across the chest at the last moment if she had to stop suddenly, and if your head hit the dashboard, well that was your fault for calling “shot gun” in the first place!
See! That’s exactly what I’m talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You’re spoiled rotten! You guys wouldn’t have lasted five minutes back in 1970 or any time before!
Regards,
The Over 40 Crowd”
To those of us who are 65 or older, this “over 40″ letter seems pretty silly! You 40 year olds apparently don’t know how good YOU had it! Fortunately, when the old timers of my youth told me how hard it was “in their day,” I didn’t make any such commitment to not pass the favor on to you “kids.”
You talk about going to the library to look stuff up. We could too–if we could get someone to drive us the 50 or so miles to the nearest library. I did get to go there. Once. We had the luxury of a monthly “book-mobile” visit at my school. By the way, you forgot to mention in your letter that the “card catalog” was a manifestation of the “Dewey Decimal System,” which was the subject of a two-semester class in college. Not any child on the planet ever figured out how to effectively use it. Also, the “Search” function in those days meant to actually read the whole book very carefully–at least twice.
Walk accross the street to your mailbox? What a luxury! My mailbox was at the post office. I was lucky, though. I only lived about 10 blocks from it. Stamps were three cents–but three cents was actually worth three cents back then. We had to LICK them. Lick enough, and your tongue became stuck to the roof of your mouth, and you couldn’t poop for a week.
You say society didn’t CARE if your parents beat you? In my day I believe it was a requirement! I still have the image of my father’s belt indellibly imprinted on my mind, and quite probably on my ass.
Tape music off the radio? No-one had a tape recorder! If we wanted to hear a song that we didn’t have on a scratchy old 78 RPM or 45 RPM record, we had to send a request to “Miss KGEM” and request it, then listen from 8:00 PM until midnight every night hoping she would actually play it. She talked over MOST of the songs, trying to get all the dedications in before they ended.
Tape players in cars were unheard of! Some of the LUXURY Cars were equipped with AM radios. It took 5 minutes for the vacuum tubes to warm up before they would begin to play. Depending on where you lived, you may only get one or two stations. They also played every pop, hiss, crackle and buzz for miles around, and they were intolerable during lightening storms.
Call waiting? Give me a break! My phone didn’t even have a dial – just a crank on the side so we could ring out the code for one of the three other people who were connected to us. Our signal was three short rings. If it was one long ring, it was for everyone, but everyone usually listened to everyone’s calls anyway, so it really wasn’t necessary. If we wanted to call anywhere else, walk to the ONE pay phone downtown, and take a pocketful of dimes — one dime bought 3 minutes, if it was a local call. None of my friends had phones in their homes anyway, so it didn’t matter much. A call to the operator was free, and they didn’t mind giving the time. We didn’t care what time it was, but would call and ask anyway, just ’cause it was “cool” to make a call.
The closest thing that existed to a cell phone was the imaginary wrist radio worn by Dick Tracy in the comics section of the newspaper. That seemed like such a huge science fiction idea. Scientists laughingly told us that such a device would have to be carried in the back of a truck — that something so small as a wrist-worn communications device was not possible.
Atari 2600? What would we have connected it to? There were no television sets. We played with these thin pieces of rectangular, rigid paper, called PLAYING CARDS. Learning to shuffle and deal a deck of cards was one of the mileposts to adulthood. We could also play dice games, if we wanted to see little boxes moving around in front of our faces.
Sob, sob for using a TV Guide, and waiting for Saturday cartoons. At least you had television! We sat around in the evenings watching the radio. I will admit, though, that the shows on the radio were much more visual than TV shows, because they engaged our minds instead of dis-engaging them like TV does today.
Microwaves? Stoves? Yeah, we had stoves. But first we had to go chop wood, then build a fire in them and wait for it to get hot enough to cook. This was nice on those freezing winter days (especially after hiking the 25 miles back from school, uphill, barefoot, through snowdrifts) but not so pleasant on those 100 degree days. The only air conditioner that had been invented by then was an openable window and a metal-bladed table fan that would incrementally shorten your finger if you stuck it through the grill.
Car seats? Back seats? My back seat was an open pickup bed. Not only no car seat, NO SEAT AT ALL. Winter heater back there was a ratty old blanket that would blow out if you didn’t get enough of it under your butt.
You 40 year old whipper-snappers! You don’t have a CLUE how good you had it! You probably even had indoor toilets! If you haven’t experienced a weathered wooden hole on a minus 20 degree morning, and crumpled pages from the Sears catalog for wiping your butt, you have no license to complain about ANYTHING.
How could YOU have survived the ’40′s? I’ll tell you how! With all the joy and delight of youth–just like the kids do today in this ‘very different from ours’ environment that they will be writing about in 50 to 60 years.
:)