Remember When? Part Deux

[Dogmudgeon]

As item-by-item as I could make it ...
if your life was as charmed as the the one on the previous list,
you had it good

Nobody told girls about their periods, so when it started,
it would stain their ugly gym uniforms,
and everybody would laugh at them?

You had a TV with a color disc that spun in front of it,
giving you real good color television,
but then RCA and NBC made the FCC outlaw the system?

Nearly everyone’s Mom was at home having sex with the milkman
before the kids got home from school?

Nobody owned 45 cats they thought were all reincarnated witches?

When a quarter’s allowance would let you see FIVE movies?

You’d reach into a muddy gutter for a penny,
and get a beating when you got home because you ‘stoled’ it?

Your Mom wore nylons and your Dad called her a ‘filthy tramp’?

All your male teachers wore neckties and female teachers had
their hair done every day and wore high heels ...
and at night, switched outfits?

You got your windshield cleaned, oil checked, and gas pumped,
without asking, all for free, every time?
And you didn’t pay for air? And, you got trading stamps to boot?
And it didn’t matter that a small car was the size of a 2003 Hummer?

Laundry detergent had free glasses, dishes or towels hidden inside the box,
but would also make mutant algae grow in all the creeks, rivers and lakes?

Being taken out to dinner at a real restaurant with your parents
meant they were going to tell you that they were getting a divorce?

They threatened to keep kids back a grade if they got polio ... and they did?

When a Model A was erveryone’s dream car,
and people would spoon and canoodle even when they had “honorable intentions”?

No one ever asked where the car keys were because they didn’t have a car?

Lying on your back on the cell floor with your friends and saying things like,
“Please, Herr Übergruppenführer, I’m a gentile, honest I am!”

Stuff from the store came without safety caps and hermetic seals
because the companies were too damn cheap, and never
reported poisonings to the police for fear of losing sales?

And with all our progress, don’t you just wish, just once,
you could slip back in time and savor the slower pace,
and share it with the children of today,
most of whom you would proceed to beat senseless
because it was socially acceptable then?

When being sent to the principal’s office was nothing
compared to the fate that awaited our families at home?
Basically we were in fear for our lives,
mainly because our families were liberals, communists, and Jews,
and the government was the National Socialist German Workers’ Party?

In America, our parents and grandparents were a much bigger threat!
But we survived because their love was greater than the threat.
Besides, they were drunk off their asses half the time and forgot
why they were beating us after a stroke or two.

Send this on to someone who can still remember
Adolph Hitler, the Silvershirts, Benito Mussolini,
Martin Dies and the House Un-American Committee,
the Ku Klux Klan, Minstrelsy, Father Coughlin,
Lynching, Amos ‘n’ Andy, Poliomyelitis and Castor Oil.

As well as summers filled with mosquitos, dysentery,
cesspool overflow, visits to the polio ward,
and eating bugs because your family was poor.

Didn’t that feel good, just to go back and say, “Yeah, I remember that”?

The perfect age is somewhere between old enough to be tried as an adult
and too young to be executed?

Remember?

Infected, un-inspected meat
Ten Little ... well, you know
Coca-Cola Company paying “coloreds” 5 cents an hour
“Coloreds”
Whites-only Coffee shops with tableside jukeboxes
Cocaine and morphine in soda pop
Milk delivery in certain neighborhoods only
Newsreels of the Holocaust before the movie
H.L. Mencken, who hated everybody

No telephone service in most of the South
No electricity, either
No civil rights, either
No vitamins, either
But plenty of goiters!

Hiroshima and Nagasaki
The Rape of Nanking
Records from the John Birch Society
Christmas Seals to fight Polio
Which was called Infantile Paralysis

No refrigeration
No typewriters
Beanies were for ‘Hebrews’ only
Cecil was ‘Cecil Rhoades’
The execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
Rapes by college ‘lettermen’ at drive-ins
Velocipedes ... Walking ...

Washing everything by hand
Toothbrushes made of boar’s hair
Reel-to-reel tape recorders like Nixon used
Tinkering in Africa
Evicting poor folks over $5 of rent
The ‘Jolly N****r Bank’
Lincoln being shot
15 cent per hour airline pilots

Quemoy and Matsu -
with Mao, that awful pink slob of a ‘Chinaman’

Penny candy but no fluoride

Cars that got 5 miles for each 35 cent gallon of gas?
Food poisoning that was common in the summer?

Do you remember a time when...

Decisions were made by going “I’ll let the help do it”?
Mistakes were corrected by simply exclaiming, “You’re Fired!”
“Race issue” meant arguing about who would get to make the noose?
Stopping the Commies could anxiously occupy an entire decade?
It wasn’t odd to have two or three friends who died in house fires?

The only curable thing you could catch from the opposite sex was pubic lice?
Having a weapon in school was compulsory in Virginia?
A foot of snow was a dream come true provided you had in-home heat?

Saturday morning cartoons were in newspapers only?
“Oly-oly-oxen-free” was a cuss word used against the ‘Krauts’?
Spinning around, getting dizzy, and falling down was undiagnosable?

The worst embarrassment was not having clothes that fit because your family was too poor?
War was the only way countries settled their differences?
Baseball was transformed into crooked business by Shoeless Joe Jackson’s sponsors?
Taking orange-flavored chewable aspirin made your little brother into a ‘spazz’ before he had to go into the home?
The Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs were the ultimate weapon?

If you can remember most or all of these,
then you have been paying attention
while the rest of the old farts
have been having fantasizing
about ‘good times’ that never existed.

Pass this on . . .I triple-dog-dare-ya!


--bkl
Time is a Fan
The Future Blows
The Past Sucked