When I was growing up, spam came in the mail, it was called a chain letter. You'd get a letter telling you to send five copies of the letter to people you know, and you should send money to a random person and get good luck, along with threats of bad luck if you 'broke' the chain.
Today the equivalent is the Facebook status bullshit. Usually it begins talking about some terrible disease like cancer, or perhaps something patriotic about the troops. It ends with something along the lines of 97% of people will not put this in their status, because they are evil soulless bastards who are better off dead. Or something like that.
One that has recently been doing the rounds is this one:
When I was a kid I didn't have a XBox, Wii, cell phone or computer. I had a pushbike and a curfew, a.k.a. the street lights. I lived outside, not inside. If I didn't eat what my mom made, I didn't eat. I didn't dare tell my parents no nor talk back. Life wasn't hard, it was Life. And I survived! Repost if you drank water out of a hose and hand sanitizer didn't exist, but u COULD get your mouth washed out with soap!
Now the first time I saw it, it was posted by someone over the age of 45, which makes sense a little bit if you want to look at the past through rose tinted glasses. But recently I saw it posted by someone in their 20s, and thought what the fuck?
I have always thought it was a huge mistake to overly romanticize the past. My own mother does this a lot, and talks of her idyllic childhood with so little crime. Of course she is rather ignoring the reality that millions of the men likely to commit violent crime had just been brutally slaughtered in the world's most horrific and bloody world war!
My problem with this status update is with almost every line of this stupid post, so I'll break it down for you:
"When I was a kid I didn't have a XBox, Wii, cell phone or computer."
- Awesome, and when your grandparents were kids, they didn't have anti-biotics, and kids died needlessly from illnesses we can cure these days. Now sure, they still die needlessly, but that's because our country likes to withhold medicine from the poor kids, so the rich people can get richer.
But hey, if you think it was better before technology, log off Facebook, turn off your fucking computer, and stop using technology to whine about technology like it's a bad thing.
"I had a pushbike and a curfew, a.k.a. the street lights."
- I'm pretty sure that bicycles are still available in this modern era. We have streetlights too.
"I lived outside, not inside."
- That's because there was nothing to do in the house because you lived in a backwards era.
"If I didn't eat what my mom made, I didn't eat. I didn't dare tell my parents no nor talk back."
- So your parents made you live in fear, and starved you if they fed you food you didn't like. Awesome.
"Life wasn't hard, it was Life. And I survived!"
- If life wasn't hard, why talk about 'surviving' it? I never say, I survived watching TV last night. You only use that word if the experience was hard, so that statement is contradictory and stupid.
"Repost if you drank water out of a hose and hand sanitizer didn't exist,"
- Ah yes, the good old days, when bacteria didn't exist.
"...but u COULD get your mouth washed out with soap!"
- I'm guessing you could also get your ass beat for improper grammar and writing 'u' instead of 'you.' I mean seriously don't be telling me about the good old days while using modern 'txt' abbreviations! That's just fucktarded. As is the notion that good parenting involves forcing a child to ingest soap.
Sorry, but the fact is, whoever wrote this tiresome chain letter is an idiot. There was no perfect time, no golden era, it's just the simple reality that for the most part, people look back with fondness as their childhood. But let us never forget that this is just a personal perspective. Life wasn't magical in the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, or any other time. So let's not try and pretend that when we grew up life was any more special than when kids today grow up.
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