Amused, kinda annoyed (Shocker, I know), and somewhat scared.
Today I got this via e-mail (one of those forwarded a million times things).
THE SPOILED UNDER-30 CROWD!!!
If you are 30 or older you will think this is hilarious!!!!
When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were. When they were growing up; what with walking Twenty-five miles to school every morning....
Uphill... barefoot...
BOTH ways
Yadda, yadda, yadda
And I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on my kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!
But now that... I'm over the ripe old age of thirty, I can't help but look around and notice the youth of today.
You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia!
And I hate to say it, but you kids today, you don't know how good you've got it!
I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have The Internet. If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves, in the card catalogue!!
There was no email!! We had to actually write somebody a letter - with a pen!
Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take, like, a week to get there! Stamps were 10 cents!
Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all my friends also had permission to kick our ass! Nowhere was safe!
There were no MP3' s or Napsters! If you wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself!
Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ would usually talk over the beginning and @#*% it all up! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our car. We'd play our favorite tape and "eject" it when finished and the tape would come undone. Cause - that's how we rolled, dig?
We didn't have fancy crap like Call Waiting! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it!
And we didn't have fancy Caller ID either!
When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent, you just didn't know!!! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!
We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high-resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like 'Space Invaders' and 'Asteroids'. Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination!! And there were no multiple levels or screens, it was just one screen.... forever!
And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died! Just like LIFE!
You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel! NO REMOTES!!!
There was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying!?! We had to wait ALL WEEK for cartoons, you spoiled little brats!
And we didn't have microwaves, if we wanted to heat something up we had to use the stove! Imagine that!
That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980 or before!
Regards,
The Over 30 Crowd
Ok. Read that? Ok. Now, over the last couple weeks there's been an ongoing e-mail conversation between my Mother-in-law, my two sisters-in-law and me regarding our upcoming family vacation at the end of July. We're planning a spa day and we need to plan who's bringing what, who's going to cook on what nights, blah, blah, blah.
(Background note - C's bro K and wife S, just had a baby in February)
So, today this e-mail comes from S:
We already signed up to make spaghetti/meatballs, so I don't care which day we cook - whatever works out for everyone else. We called dibs on the easy meal this year since one half of our couple doesn't know how to cook and we have a baby now. LOL
Ok, so how are the above forwarded thing about how kids today have it so easy and my SIL's email related and why am I annoyed?
First of all, I'm annoyed at my SIL because she keeps playing this "we have a baby now" card. Like everything is so much more difficult because "we have a baby now". Now, before you flame me, please know that I fully understand that having a baby is a MASSIVE adjustment and completely puts your life into upheaval. I get that. But, humans have been having babies for thousands of years, and under much more difficult circumstances than my SIL and BIL who both earn 6 figures, live in a brand new home, and have the full support of two families.
My mother gave birth to and raised eight (count them) 8!!! children. Most of the time she had at least 2 in diapers (cloth diapers that had to be washed) at the same time. She did this mostly on her own because my father was a farmer and literally worked from sun-up to sundown. She raised these eight children in totally unchildproofed houses, with uncarpeted steps, iron radiators, electrical outlets in the floors, on farms with all kinds of dangerous equipment sitting around, coal or wood stoves, wringer washers and one bathroom. And we all lived! With minimal injuries!
I wonder if my SIL could have done it? What I really want to do is reply to her e-mail with the above paragraph. But I won't.
This relates in a small way to the e-mail about kids today having it so easy. My SIL often talks about how she goes on-line to find out about things the baby is doing and whether they are "normal" and to find out what to do if she's having a problem. My mother couldn't do any of that. She was out on a farm. She couldn't drive to even get to a library. She could call her mother, but her mother was a bit of a nutcase whose "advice" was iffy at best. So, she did most of it all on her own, using common sense, instinct, and what I can only think were the inborn skills of a natural caregiver. (Those skills were NOT passed along to her youngest daughter, hahahahah!).
Yeah, life is definately easier these days. Is it better? We played outside - we played tag and rode bikes. Kids today sit inside and play XBox and get fat. I learned how to cook at an early age and take pride in making a good tasting meal. My other SIL (not S) jokes about how she NEVER cooks and doesn't want to. ("I want to find a man who will take me out for dinner every night" Come on...seriously?) But even S is...'it's so hard to make dinner "because we have a baby now". ' Ugh. My mother cooked 3 meals a day, 7 days a week and had infants and toddlers to keep an eye on. Oy, sometimes I just want to slap them both.
I don't know. Am I being too critical? Is this just the way things are progressing here in the 21st century and I should just shut up about it? I just don't know if we're heading in the right direction. And that scares me. Someone's still going to have to know how to grow and raise food. Someone's still going to have to know how to make that food ok for human consumption. Someone's going to have to know how to make clothing, how to build shelters, how to find water. We can't all sit and stare at computer screens all day long. But the people who know practical skills are becoming fewer and fewer. The people who are willing to do manual labor are becoming fewer and fewer. What is going to happen? Maybe I won't be around to see it.