If you lived as a child in the 80's and 90's, how did you survive?
Looking back, its hard to believe that I didnt even break my skull.
As children, we would ride in cars with no child seats! we were forced to wear seatbelts that wrapped around our necks, with each high speed turn my mother made, we faced the prospect of strangulation or even worse, decapitation!
And there were no super-safe SUV, noooooo! we had to brave the first generation of SUV's, driven by our inexperienced SUV driving moms! The ones which would spontaneously explode or flip around, then explode!
And sometimes, we would have to ride in the trunk! this was not a pickup from which you could leap away to safety in the event your mom came to understand the forces of inertia, mass, and momentum as she tried to turn away at 90mph from a cliff!
Our baby cribs were full of electronic dangling toys, at any moment they could detach, fall into your mouth, and electrocute you! and we didnt have the harmless, high inducing lead paint, no, we had to sleep in plastic covered linen!
We didnt have the materials to build our go-karts from scratch, where you could make sure the quality was good before you decided to test the prototype.
Noooooo... we had POWER WHEELS
Power Wheels were built with no quality control or safety testing, no, they were built by cheap Tawanese slave labor, out of the same plastic tampon covers are made of!
As we went down cliffs in the hot asphalt, the wheels would melt and cause the vehicle to steer our of control and flip around into the pavement, where as the molten plastic and the insides of the battery would eat their way into your skin, you would watch helplessly as SUV driving soccer moms would not make the slightest effort to evade your wreck!
We would leave home in the morning, no one would reach us until 2pm, when the bell on the school would ring, and avalanches of bigger students in our overcrowded school would trample their way down the stairs as they ran away from the classroom, to freedom!
Then we would have to brave our way into the parking lot, full of smog and the deafening sound of many SUVs honking in unison, as you looked up at the lumbering giant wheels which crushed everything on their path.
No cell phones, we had beepers! we couldnt talk back. If you were playing away from home and your mom messaged you with
"wait till you get back you have hell to pay" you would just walk your way home preparing yourself for the beating for which the reason was unknown.
And lord forbids that your beeper made any sound during class, or the teacher would take it away, and then you would have to explain your caffeine addicted soccer mom why you lost your $250 gadget.
We had fights, and the other kid was a black belt in Karate, Taek Kwon Do, or had really long, dirty nails. And there was no honor, they would try to kick you in the balls and bite your eyes.
We drank soy milk, and other crap new age foods because our parents were adamant that we had to be thin and beautiful, so at 3:00PM when the Karate black belt kid was waiting for you outside, you had no energy to Kung Fu your way out of this one.
We had Super Nintendo, Genesis, and the lucky ones, 3D0. There were no fancy pansy CD's or DVD based games! these were CARTRIDGES! the games would hang and you had to take the cartridge out and blow air at it until you were dizzy! And there were no politically correct characters to choose! it was either the stereotypical japanese girl with extreme agility, the homosexual blond european, or the gung-hu american commandos (the white one was cool, the black one was strong)
Those video games were boring so we went outside and made friends, and SWORDS made out of wood and rusting nails, and we would play swordfighting were if you lose you faced the prospect of gangrene or infected wood splinters pushing their way inside your arms. And if you accidentally hit the other kid too hard, he would either beat your bellybutton with fancy Karate, or he would tell his parents who would force your parents to court and they would take your mom's SUV away and your Super Nintendo!
We would play adventurers in the woods looking for treasure, but all we could find were strange used up syringes and passed out bum hippies from another era!
Watching cartoons there was always the danger of an epileptic attack from all the bright colors and BUY THEM ALL flashing in colors that would hurt your eyes and brain!
Some students werent as smart as others, so they were separated into different classrooms where they were told time and time again that they were special like a unique snowflake of God, and they would grow up to be psychos bringing guns to school and shooting the normal kids!
Our actions were our parents legal responsability, so the was hell to pay if we made a mistake
Consequences were completly unpredictable
We had to hide behind the LIE that our parents would bail us out.
And still this generation is producing some of the brightest individuals and innovations that are ignored and condemned by earlier generations who still can not get over the idea that society is ever changing and that they have to either adjust, or keep whining their way into shadow.
