What Makes a Baby Boomer Invincible

Here is a  witty look back on  what it was like to grow up as a baby boomer.  It might explain why we are a generation that will not go silently into retirement but instead choose to be an active life-participant until the day they close the lids on our coffins.  It also helps to explain the reasoning behind how our children were raised.

 TO ALL THE KIDS WHO SURVIVED THE
 1930’s, 40’s, 50’s 
 

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.  They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can and didn’t get tested for diabetes. Then after we survived that trauma and were born, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with brightly colored lead-base paints and left to sleep the night with no baby monitor to hear our every sound. When we got a cold the first thing mom got out was the Vick’s Vapor Rub. As infants & children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags.  When we got old enough to sit on our dads’ laps while they were driving, we helped to steer the car as it cruised down the highway. 

 We grew up in a world that had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, locks on doors or cabinets and when we rode our bikes, we had baseball caps not helmets on our heads.   Riding in the back of a pick up truck on a warm summer day was always a special treat and somehow we knew enough to hold on tight because the road was bumpy.
 
We drank water from the garden hose that had been laying in the hot sun and not from a hermetically sealed store-bought bottle of water.  We shared one bottle of soft drink with our four best friends, shared our peanut butter sandwich and sometimes even a candy bar  and no one actually died from this. We grew up on a diet of cupcakes, white bread, real butter, red meat and bacon. We drank Kool-aid made with real white sugar and our mom’s baked with lard but we weren’t overweight. WHY?   
 
Because we were always outside, playing…that’s why!  We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on or our mothers called us to dinner.  No one was able to reach us all day because we didn’t have cell phones and yet we were O.K.  We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps of wood and baby buggy tires and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes.  After running into the bushes a few times we learned to solve the problem.
 
 We did not have PlayStations, Nintendos and X-boxes. There were no video games, no 150 channels on cable, no video movies streaming into our TV or DVDs to rent.  There was no surround-sound or CDs or Ipods, no texting, no cell phones, no personal computers, no Internet, no MySpace  and no chat rooms.  How did we survive?

We had friends and we went outside and found them!  We made up our own games. We fought our own fights face-to-face and then we made up.  We sang songs together and played together and used our imagination to create a world just for us.  Sometimes, we fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth but there were no lawsuits from these accidents. It was just expected that that’s what kids do.  If necessary, justice was meted out by our parents; sometimes it was a spanking, sometimes it was getting grounded and sometimes we were just given extra chores.

We ate our share of worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms did not live in us forever. We were given BB guns for our 10th birthdays, we made up games with sticks and tennis balls and, although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes.  We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell, or if we knew them well enough, just walked in and talked to them.  Half of our wardrobe was made up of hand-me-downs.  We had patches on the knees of our pants and our sweaters were knit by grandma.
     
We were competitive and we learned this very young.  Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team.  Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment.  Imagine that!  We couldn’t do what our older brothers and sisters did because we were too young and we had to wait for our turn when we reached that age. The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of.  They actually sided with the law and worse, they sided with the teachers in school.  If we got in trouble in school, you had better believe we would get punished at home.
 
 It wasn’t easy as a kid growing up back then but we did.   And yet, these generations have produced some of the best risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever.  The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all from the first day we were born.  Looking back, we had to have been invincible to have survived. Even though we know better, kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors, doesn’t it ?’; //leave this line

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