i’m a boomer, I remember this stuff…
How It Used To Be
It took three minutes for the TV to warm up.
Nobody owned a purebred dog.
A quarter was a decent allowance and made with real silver.
Your Mom wore stockings that came in two pieces - one for each leg.
You didn't pay for air.
You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked and gas pumped, without asking, all for free, every time.
Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box and you got trading stamps too.
And don't forget Crackerjacks! A prize in every box.
Teachers threatened to keep kids back a grade if they failed...and they did it.
No one ever asked where the car keys were because they were always in the car, in the ignition, and the doors were never locked. This sometimes applied to house keys, too.
Playing baseball with no adults to help kids with the rules.
Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals because no one had yet tried to kill a perfect stranger with mass-distributed poison.
Wax Coke-shaped bottles with colored sugar water inside.
Blackjack, Clove, Pepsin and Teaberry chewing gum.
Home milk delivery in glass bottles with cardboard stoppers.
Telephone numbers with a word prefix. And no area code for local calls.
78's and 45's - no, not guns.
S&H Green Stamps
Mimeograph machines
Having a weapon in school meant being caught with a peashooter or a slingshot.
Saturday morning cartoons weren't commercials for action figures.
The worst embarrassment was being picked last for a team.
Water balloons were the ultimate weapon and war was a card game.
People "went steady."
You'd reach into a muddy gutter for a penny - made with real copper. (I still do...giggle).
“Olly-olly-oxen-free”made perfect sense.
People didn’t go into schools, bars, festivals, or stadiums
and shoot strangers just for the hell of it.
and I was particularly lucky because I grew up in a mixed- race neighborhood for the first nine years of my life so I’ve always been colorblind and unafraid of difference.
Having said this, there was plenty of hypocrisy & bullshit back then too-particularly
#racism #sexism #homophobia and let’s not forget lead paint and asbestos, too.
Of course now we have newly-intensified
#racism/
#misogyny #homophobia
#theocracy mass shootings the rollback of women’s bodily autonomy, book censorship, a congress infested with insurrectionists, religious whackjobs, and an ex- President who’s a convicted sex offender who had other sexual offenders – mostly pedophiles – working in the local areas of his campaign and yes, I’ve documented it so don’t give me any shit – and was found to have stolen classified government documents in his personal residence…and who also happens to be a racist, a scammer, and a grifter who admires Hitler and wants to run for president again.
and don’t forget, if you or I were found with stolen classified government documents in our basement we’d be sitting in jail right now. Kind of makes you wonder just how high up and down deep this corruption goes, doesn’t it? And don’t get me going on Scotus…