A different time, a different world

You're right, Bucky Covington was on American Idol!


I hear ya. I was having this conversation the other day. I also say the same things to my kids too, they so think mommy is ancient!lol!

hahahaha

I laughed out loud at the remote with a wire on it.  I REMEMBER THAT!  Though we weren't well off enough to have one ourselves.  But my gal pals were living large!  That cord constantly tripped people and was yanked apart.  But it was easier to find when we lost it.

~lifts buttcheek and farts dust.

Sometimes I wish I didn't have such a vivid imagination, it would keep me from picturing comments like these in my mind.

That is a great song which I haven't heard yet. How did we ever survive?

I remember the years before car seats. Picture this: age 4-ish, standing up in the passenger seat, hands on the dashboard propping myself up, forehead against the windshield, no seat belt in sight.

I was my dads 'remote control' "elie? change it to channel 2 will you?

I climbed trees Oh My god, I fell from them too, I played ball with no head protection {maybe that explains allot!}

Sadly we are raising a bunch of wimps, that do not understand that not everyone is good enough to play certain sports and should be told so!

I'm not that old to remember not having a TV in the house, but moving to Puerto Rico in '84 kinda gave me an idea of what things were like in the US before TV's were invented. Not that there weren't TV's in PR, it was just more like how this song describes back in the day. We played outside more than we watched TV. Saturday was basically the day I watched TV the most, maybe an hour or 2 on weekdays.

I use to love jumping on my bike and running off to a friends house or just to ride around the town. I miss the school parties, trying to meet girls and conjure up the valor to ask them to dance. I miss playing in the fields behind my house, making guns out of 3 pieces of wood, 2 nails, a clothes pin and a rubber band to shoot stuff from the guns, playing games like tag, hide and go seek, baseball with balls made of aluminum and covered with electric tape. I use to climb to the roof of my house in the middle of the night to watch the cars drive by and watch the stars that were so clear. Turning on the hose to wet ourselves was a weekend must. Paper planes from last years school notebooks gave hours of fun and hours of yelling for filling the community street with paper. $1 could actually get you a soda, a bag of chips, some cookies and gum. School was fun, no security guards, no constant lawsuits or police for childish behavior. Those were the good old days, my kids got a small taste the last time we were in PR, even though things were a bit more like over here.

Today we have pedophiles in every corner, gangs shooting without a care, stressed people who work too much and don't make enough (according to themselves), people who can't drive, drunk people who shouldn't drive, craziness in many religions, etc. The list gets worse. What is happening to our society?

I laughed out loud at the remote with a wire on it. I REMEMBER THAT! Though we weren't well off enough to have one ourselves. But my gal pals were living large! That cord constantly tripped people and was yanked apart. But it was easier to find when we lost it.

Yeah, those were good times.  .  Heck, this generation looks at corded phones as ancient....can you imaging if they would have had to dial on a *gasp* *shock* ROTARY phone?!?!?!

I remember the years before car seats. Picture this: age 4-ish, standing up in the passenger seat, hands on the dashboard propping myself up, forehead against the windshield, no seat belt in sight.

Or riding in the back of a pick-up, or having you and all your friends piled in the back of a stationwagen?

How did we live without bike helmets or knee pads.  Can you imagine learning to rollarskate without knee pads?? The horror!!!!

 

Here's another example of "the dangers of today's society":

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — An elementary school has banned tag on its playground after some children complained they were harassed or chased against their will.

Link

Oh the horrors of being forced to play tag against your will. I guess one of the other kids held a gun or a knife on the tagged kids back and told him "you better run and try to catch someone or I'll stab you or shoot you".

Yeah, those were good times. . Heck, this generation looks at corded phones as ancient....can you imaging if they would have had to dial on a *gasp* *shock* ROTARY phone?!?!?!

Imagine them having to talk on the phone in a single room and not being able to go places and talk on the phone at the same time. I still remember some of the first CD commercials where they showed a shiny disk on the bottom, a red laser coming from the top and then a rock group jump out of the red laser and rocking. I never understood it at first, I was into cassettes.

, I remember making mixed tapes, letting the tape rn a few more seconds before I stopped recording and then rewind a few second and start recording the next song so that the click of the stop button wouldn't come out while playing it. And having to actually listen to the whole song just to record it? My God, it took a whole hour and 20 minutes to record a 60 minute tape.

Never mind not being able to walk around the room, imagine not being able to drive while on the phone, or in the middle of a business meeting, or anywhere but by a wall jack... scary.

Oh the horrors of being forced to play tag against your will. I guess one of the other kids held a gun or a knife on the tagged kids back and told him "you better run and try to catch someone or I'll stab you or shoot you".

Shouldn't kids be taught to stand up for themselves. This sounds like a perfect opportunity. I'll be the first to admit that I'll attempt to avoid conflict wherever possible, but I did learn how to get out of these situations as a child by having to deal with them, not by being protected from them. As adults, we should endeavor to give kids the information they need to learn these lessons with as little experience as possible. We can't simply take experience out of the equation, though, and assume that the lesson can be still be learned. Knowing a lesson is not the same as learning it. Like hearing the music is different from listening to it, if you get my meaning.

Damn, I hate getting to the middle of what I'm writing and realizing that I ought to listen to my own advice.

Shouldn't kids be taught to stand up for themselves. This sounds like a perfect opportunity. I'll be the first to admit that I'll attempt to avoid conflict wherever possible, but I did learn how to get out of these situations as a child by having to deal with them, not by being protected from them. As adults, we should endeavor to give kids the information they need to learn these lessons with as little experience as possible. We can't simply take experience out of the equation, though, and assume that the lesson can be still be learned. Knowing a lesson is not the same as learning it. Like hearing the music is different from listening to it, if you get my meaning. Damn, I hate getting to the middle of what I'm writing and realizing that I ought to listen to my own advice.

I believe there are things kids should not have to wait to experience in order to learn, such as guns, knives and beatings. these things we should protect them from them. But a game of tag? Every child in the school pays the price for the cries of a few kids? Sad, so sad. I'm the first one here to bitch about people not standing up for themselves and doing something about our Gov't system and here we have children basically doing exactly what I said except they applied it to the wrong problem.

I believe there are things kids should not have to wait to experience in order to learn, such as guns, knives and beatings.

I'll agree here. Those are things for which the results can be seen and are disastrous. Think of this, though. If you were aware of or saw the results of a beating/shooting etc., how meaninful would the sight or knowledge of that pain be if you'd never been subject to any slight injury. Warning a child that something is dangerous is one thing. Teaching them to want to avoid it through experience extension would probably be more meaningful and forces the child to think the situation through more, which I'd suspect would only increase their understanding of the lesson, and therefore the desire to follow it..

I should disclose that I am not yet a parent, which is why I speak in the subjunctive.

I have always had a very vivid imagination, to the point that some might consider it morbid. As a child, I'd imagine stabbing myself in the stomach with a kitchen knife, not because I wanted pain or death, but I was curious. A few accidental cuts on my finger with a small knife quickly made me shy from this thought. I was still curious, but was also wary enough to know that it was not a pain worth experiencing, considering the pain of that small cut. If I'd not been able to be in a situation where I might get a small cut on a finger, who's to say that "morbid" curiosity might not have one day gotten the best of me.

How to deal with people can't be learned simply by being told the lesson. That's not to say that a lesson is unimportant, but new, sometimes difficult situations are what forces people to put that lesson into action and learn how to bend it appropriately to other scenarios. If people are shielded from every difficult situation, then those lessons are nothing but platitudes, and as such thoroughly impractibable.

I know what you mean, good thing about today is we have the Internet. No real need to expose my child to pain and suffering when there are videos on youtube.com to show him this pain from the safety of our home.   

One wonders how children survived to adulthood.  There was no one to take care of them, since the nanny government had not been fully formed.  Children actually took risks - and failed.  The horrors of it!  How could we ever let our children to get hurt, or worse, lose!

The world is filled with ghosts - killed by a lack of supervision from the state - who just dont know they are supposed to be dead, maimed, emotionally damaged for all eternity - because there was no nanny Sam to take care of them from the cold uncaring callous parents.

I did just fine and my parents weren't always on top of me. Sure my mom was always worried but she trusted my judgment even when I was 12 years old. I remember going to school parties at around 13 every Friday and/or Saturday and the parties were not close . I had till 1:00 AM to get back home. I usually showed up around 12:30 considering I had to walk for about 20 minutes from the parties. My mom new that sometimes there are thing you can only learn by experiencing them. That's why I often wonder what could happen to those children who grow up in a pillow covered room (if you know what I mean) and become adults and bump into concrete walls for the first time? Talk about taking the child out of children. Eliminate all that can teach them about life and then throw them into a school system that sucks and you get the same results as the movie Idiocracy.

I just showed my 8 year old and 4 year old 2 pictures of of people who didn't brush their teeth. My oldest did not react much but will find out tonight just how much impact it had on him since he had already brushed his teeth this morning. But my youngest? He ran to the bathroom almost instantly after looking at the pictures. My wife tells me "he's in the bathroom brushing his teeth". I didn't even notice till she told me. Guess that theory worked.

No real need to expose my child to pain and suffering when there are videos on youtube.com to show him this pain from the safety of our home.

!

You know it just occurred to me that the song is really lacking something.  They should have taken out the drinking and smoking mother part and replaced it with the something about vulgar language and adult content.  Man, every public place I go I have to tell my daughter to ignore some swear word that somebody used.  There are only a couple radio stations that I can listen to to avoid swear words.  And, there are very few movies that the whole family can go to anymore.  What's up with that?

People want to talk about how we have made the world "safer" since those days, but I'm not sure.  Sure, women shouldn't smoke or drink- but why aren't we so harsh on the parents of fat kids (don't even get me started on the child obesity rate)?  We make everything so "safe" that kids don't fear things like they should.  Cars are so "safe" and easy to drive, that people don't think of them as the killing machines that they are.  Instead of teaching and learning, we try to "protect".  The problem is that when things go wrong, people no longer know what to do.

I miss a lot of the "good old days" as some people like to call it.  I miss the time before people sued over spilling hot coffee in their lap (it didn't WARN me that it was hot!) or before you had to insure yourself for every little thing that somebody could sue you for.  I miss the days when things didn't run 24/7 and people knew how to take a day off.  I miss the days when people used common sense and didn't assume that somebody else would warn them about something (ever read the warning tag on a hairdryer?). 

I just saw a TV show last night about some of the worlds funniest commercials. They had this one, I don't remember the country, where a guy passes by another girls desk and asked her what was that jar with money on her desk. She told him it was a curse jar where if people cursed they had to put money in it. He wondered who would get the money, the girl explained it would be used for the office. Things like office supplies, new equipment, lunch and maybe even beer. The guy replied "F_ucking awesome" and dropped a quarter in the jar. the the commercial goes on to having everyone in the company cursing about anything. The funniest was a girl who was having trouble with a copy machine and said "Oh poop". A co-worker comes out of a cubicle and said "that doesn't count" and she replies "Oh f_ck you George". then at the end the Boss holds a meeting and everyone has a beer in their hands and almost evry word he said about how good a job they did that month had a curse word after it. keep in ind the whole commercial was bleep after bleep after bleep.

That was a funny yet sad commercial. I wonder if the country it was from bleeped the words?



Yea, I love the fact that we have people who have opposing views over abortion and whether the baby is a baby or a mass of cells while having commercials how about pregnant shouldn't drink or smoke during pregnancy but God forbid we tell these same women anything once the child is born.



Same here, we have become a pillow society who fears even brain freezes. And if they continue to hold back our military we will eventually not be able to defend ourselves either.

I like the song, but can't help but think that there's no way that Bucky Covington lived through all of those things.  Much of what is mentioned in the song happened or changed back in the 60's and 70's.  Covington has to be all of 35 years old, if that (maybe 36 or 37 now since it's been a few years since he was on Idol), so chances he lived through a lot of what he's singing about are next to nil.

Umm, I'm 37 and lived through just about ALL of that, terp!

Bucky is just shy of 30.

OK, so born in 77 or 78...after childproof caps, seatbelts in cars, and in the infancy of child safety seats. And DEFINITELY not old enough to remember no video games! The Atari 2600 was released before this guy was out of diapers!

OK, so born in 77 or 78...after childproof caps, seatbelts in cars, and in the infancy of child safety seats. And DEFINITELY not old enough to remember no video games! The Atari 2600 was released before this guy was out of diapers!

I had just thought to check back on Bucky's age and it was as TW mentions above.  Born in 77 (late in that year, November), so definitely born after much of the stuff he is singing about had changed.  By the time he was 3 Space Invaders, Pac-man and heck, even Ms. Pac-man had ruled the world.

The Pledge of Allegiance might have been said in his school, but that is hard to tell as I don't remember for sure when it went out of vogue.  Prayers were most likely a no-no for him unless he attended a church school.

Anyway, I like the song, and even enjoy his twangy singing of it, though it seems to me that he's trying to sound like some of the classic country artists, and that perhaps the song was manufactured to be a hit all along (not that most artists aren't trying for hits, but some have their products created by 'hitmakers' that are just about guaranteed to produce a chart topper, depending mostly on whom the artist is signed with and just how badly that record company/producer wants the artist to be a hit).

Coming from some of the older country singers, I wouldn't even consider the issue of the artists age as it would seem to fit with the song.  Knowing roughly how old Covington was, it seemed the song wasn't a good match to me.

And oh yeah, by the way, if memory serves the part about lead-based paint on cribs would have been dealt with back in the 70s for sure.  I was born in '62 myself and remember my parents having concerns about lead in paint when I was in early grade school.  By the time I was moving into high school lead based paint on cribs would definitely have been gone.  Though it did take a while after that before we got around to worrying much about the space between the rails in the cribs and things like that I guess.

 

I did think of something that the song doesn't cover though and that is mercury poisoning and scares about same.  Haz-mat handling I guess some would say.  When I was a youngster if you dropped a thermometer and it broke (which was easily enough done back in the olden days of glass tube thermometers with mercury in them) it was no big deal.  Wipe up the mess, toss the paper towel into the paper grocery bag that was lining the garbage can and go on about your business.  Now if you drop a thermometer you evacuate the building and declare it a biohazard until the mercury can be eradicated.

Same with asbestos being in buildings back in the 40's, 50's and 60's (and into the 70's and perhaps 80's before it was determined that asbestos was such a nasty thing).  Kids like me plowed through crawl spaces in ceilings and under floors finding hiding places for games of hide and seek and such and never knew that the stuff in the air that we were dustin' up was supposed to be so bad for us.

Then again workers in Pittsburgh, around Savannah, GA and other places with lots of substances in the air (Iron/Steel and black sooted smoke around Pittsburgh, paper pulp smell around Savannah, GA) never knew that the stuff they were breathing was so bad for them either.