<p>My son and most of our neighborhood boys played a lot of organized sports … at a pretty high level (travel teams), but they also played outside on their own A LOT without adult supervision or interference (until maybe upper middle school or h.s.). They played soccer, football, basketball, baseball, street hockey, rode bikes, built forts, and who knows what else. Is this that unusual in this day and age?</p>
<p>I’m glad that I have my cell phone so that I can call 911 in any situation, call for help if my car breaks down, or call home if I’m running late. I can call just to say “hi” whenever I want to. </p>
<p>I’m glad that medicine has progressed to the point where deathly diseases of your childhoods can now be cured or prevented with simple medicine, and many other diseases can be managed. How many of you have children or nieces or nephews or friends who would have died without modern medicine? Will you ever know? </p>
<p>I’m glad that, as a woman, I can go to college and go into (basically) any career I want to without being looked down upon or facing unfair challenges.</p>
<p>I’m glad that my friends and I can control when we want to have children while remaining sexually active because of birth control pills, “Plan B,” and legal abortion. I’m glad that some of my male friends weren’t forced into early fatherhood because of the imperfect nature of condoms. </p>
<p>I’m glad that it is so much easier for me to be openly gay today than it was for adult gay friends of mine to be out when they were my age. In 1960, homosexual acts were illegal in every state in the US, punishable by up to life in prison. In 1966, Time Magazine had an article called “The Homosexual in America.” The article called homosexuality a “pernicious sickness” that is “pathetic” and “pitiable” and called homosexuals “deviates” who were abnormal and “inverted”; spoke about “vengeful, derisive” attacks by the “gay mafia” on culture; and stated that homosexuality was a “disabling fear of the opposite sex” caused by failed parents and that it was “essentially a case of arrested development, a failure of learning, a refusal to accept the full responsibilities of life.” </p>
<p>I’m glad that my gay male friends know to use condoms, and I’m glad that HIV+ friends of mine can now live healthy, happy, and successful lives. In the mid-1980s, half of the gay men in New York in San Fransisco were HIV+ (and almost all are probably dead by now). </p>
<p>I’m glad that I have been able to travel extensively and easily around the US and the world. I’m glad that flying is commonplace and relatively inexpensive so I can travel to Europe or Africa or Asia or home for a long weekend.</p>
<p>I’m glad that I have immediate access to essentially unlimited information through the Internet, including information that my parents wouldn’t want me to have. Books from around the world can be quickly shipped to my local college library whenever I need a specific volume. I can type up my papers wherever I want to, and I can change specific words or rearrange paragraphs without retyping the entire thing. I can “talk” with people around the world online about things that interest me, and I can quickly communicate through email with friends, family, professors, and co-workers. I’m glad that many “different” people have been able to find peers through the internet. </p>
<p>Anyway, this discussion is ridiculous. Culture changes all the time. Many changes are good, some changes are bad, but most changes are just different. Remember, the changes you’re seeing now are almost uniformly ones that you made. Who do you think created and conceptualized video games? Who were the consumers who bought them? Who are the people inhabiting cities, making them so crowded? Who coaches organized sports teams and oversees all of the other activities of the overbooked child? Who are the parents who don’t let their children play out on the street alone but are too busy with work to go out and supervise? Who insists on constant cell phone calls from children to “check in”? You guys created these changes far more than current children or teens.</p>
<p>The only “good old days” for which I long was when I could still buy all the products which have now been discontinued in favor of improvements or somebody’s idea of a better marketing notion…ugh. I bought two cases of my favorite toothpaste on e-bay when they discontinued it, and I hope I die or my teeth fall out before it runs out…sigh.</p>
<p>I love it all. I loved being a kid on a farm in the 50s and 60s. I loved high school and I loved college in the 70s. I loved being on my own in the city and living in a high rise in the 80s and I still like 80s music. I loved all the changes in the 90s and I have loved every year that I have spent watching my daughter grow up. I love television and cell phones and ipods and trashy magazines and old movies and classic books and the “internets.” I love fresh blueberries and homemade biscuits and I love slipping a frozen pizza into the microwave. These are the good old days.</p>
<p>“These are the good old days.” Keeping that appreciation is what truly makes this time good.</p>
<p>Culture changes all the time. But isn’t it fun to compare and contrast?</p>
<p>I was thinking about this thread, and how good we have it, now and in the past, while driving along a few days ago. And feeling very sad for the Iraquis who don’t have it very good at all right now, courtesy of our invasion. We live in a special time and place, prosperous and peaceful.</p>
<p>Here here…!</p>
<p>I do have nostalgic moments when I’ve seen five ED commercials in an hour and a half, but I do think that it’s possible to utilize those technologies that I like and turn off the others.
Although my husband works in high tech, our kids didn’t touch a computer until they went to school. We didn’t sign up for organized sports until they were in 4th grade. We don’t own any kind of video games,computer games or “Game Boy”. Our kids played outside every day of their childhoods. They built forts in the woods, splashed in streams and played kickball in the front yard. In the winter they went sledding, skated, had snow forts and played ice hocky on the pond near our house. They watched only PBS until they were in the 6th grade. We didn’t have cable tv until we moved three years ago.
I didn’t have a cell phone until about a year ago. I don’t turn it on unless I need to make a call. I’ve grown to love my computer, but also enjoy ballroom dance lessons w/my husband.
There is one thing I do believe is unavoidable in todays world. Unless we are positively vigilant, childhood innocence is a thing of the past.</p>
<p>While I don’t long for the return of the Good Old Days, there are some things about the past that I’m grateful for having lived through. Examples:</p>
<p>– I’m glad I went to high school during the age of the Beatles rather than the age of Kayne West and 50 Cent.</p>
<p>– I’m glad to have been witness to the exciting early days of space travel.</p>
<p>– I’m glad to have lived through the era of figures such Muhammad Ali rather than the modern trashiness of cage fighting.</p>
<p>– I’m glad I have personal memory of the optimism and energy that swept through the country during the Kennedy administration.</p>
<p>And so on…</p>
<p>I wouldn’t go back to that era for anything, but I sure do have some great memories from those times.</p>