Way Back When...
We were lucky, so lucky when I was young. Life was good. And ah, the music! I mean, who can beat Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, the Stones, Hendrix, Joplin, Leonard Cohen, Bowie, The Beatles...? And the TV shows! I mean, we had Bonanza, The Fonz (Hey!), The Flintstones, Mr Ed, The Monkees! It was so much fun back then.
You could leave your house unlocked, and your windows open at night without fear of a home invasion. You could walk down the street late at night without fear of being mugged, murdered or raped. You dressed up to go out to the movies, and going out to dinner at a restaurant was a real treat. We had school dances, and hanging out at the mall on a Friday night was harmless fun.
We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. We rode in cars with no seat belts or air bags. We drank water from the garden hose, we shared drink bottles and nobody died from this. We ate white bread, real butter, and drank full cream milk, but we weren't overweight because we were always outside playing. We would play all day and as long as we got back for dinner, our parents never worried where we were. We did our homework before we were allowed to watch television, and we always sat at the dinner table as a family and talked about our day.
Nobody had even thought about inventing Playstations, Nintendo's, X-boxes, video games, cable TV, or dvds yet. There were no mobile phones, no computers, no Internet. What did we do for fun? We actually had friends and we played with them.
Yes, there were bad things back then – Vietnam, LSD, Heroin, but not to the same scale of bad things today. The music was clean and we actually understood the lyrics. We knew everyone on the street where we lived. Innocent fun was the norm, not mindless violence. In short, things were “groovy”.
Today we have Iraq, 911, Football Hooligans, P, Ecstasy, teenage alcoholics, murder is commonplace, not a sensation, domestic violence has escalated beyond belief, child abuse, animal abuse – the list goes on and is incredibly depressing.
I truly feel sorry for the young people today – they have it hard. They can’t handle the harsh realities of life as it is today, so they drink, do hard drugs, race their souped up cars, and many die young. For the ones that make it, what do they have to look forward to? A young couple with children these days – how on earth can they ever hope to own their own home? Even if you can manage to scrape together the deposit for a house, the mortgage is crippling. The cost of living is skyrocketing each year. War, terrorism, unemployment - what a world to live in we have today.
Sometimes, progress is not a good thing. Technology has advanced and changed our lives, and we can’t go back - but perhaps we need to return to the old moral and social values if we want to give the human race a chance to survive.