You lousy younguns have no idea how easy you have it! I tell ya, things were hard when I was your age…
We didn’t have these Dreamcasts and Playstations. We had ColecoVisions, and Intellevisions, and Atari 2800s and we were happy!
We didn’t have these Pentium II, 128 meg, monster PCs…we had Commodore 64s (64 kilobytes mind), and Radio shack TSR80s, and we were grateful…
And we didn’t have CDs; we had to make do with these big-ass records that would sound like frying bacon after about 5 plays. And we had libraries with books, instead of this freakin’ internet.
If you wanted to write to somebody, you had to use paper, instead of this instant email crap. You lousy kids never had to wait a week to get a letter…you damn kids…
< sigh. > Somehow, my future old man rants just won’t stack up to my grandfather’s accounts of World War II, or my parent’s accounts of Vietnam and the death of JFK…
Neuro-Trash: oooh, a classic! Only when my folks used it, is was five miles each way, IN THE SNOW.
Then there was the nuclear blast: you kids are so spoiled. When we were kids, we’d get candy for Christmas, and an orange, and we thought we’d been given the world.
Sad to say, my folks were much older than most parents of kids my age, and they were teens during the Depression. It was probably exact truth.
Oh, man…my dad grew up in a farmhouse that didn’t have indoor pluming until he was like 10 or something so he would tell us all how he and his brother used to open the window and pee on the roof in the winter so they wouldn’t have to trek through the snow to the outhouse. AND one year they got nothing but oranges for Xmas…AND their old farmhouse windows were so poorly fitted that they’d wake up in the morning with snow on the foot of their beds! TOP THAT!
There’s a Monty Python sketch that picks it up where you guys are now and goes way, way beyond that…
“The 24 of us had to live in a shoebox in the middle of the street. We had to get up at 4 in the morning to start working our 25 hour workday, for which we didn’t even RECEIVE a salary but HAD TO PAY, and then we got home and our drunk father would beat us up and frie us in boiling lard, just before kicking us to bed 2 hours after we got up starting to work the very next working day !!
But kids these days just don’t seem to appreciate the good things in life anymore !!”
Then the next guy takes over, exaggerating even more, etc. etc.
No exact quotes, just my memory talking.
This is for real. I walked 0.7 miles to school, which went from 6 AM to noon.Then the other shift of kids came in.In the spring we had the other shift, noon to 6PM. They had to hire more teachers, but the school was too small.Baby boom years. Four years later they had some barracks brought in, so all kids could have the regular hours.
Any generation who thinks they had it tough remember…
The 13th Generation (born 1961-1981) survived a “hurried” childhood of divorce, child abuse, latchkeys and devil-child movies. They came of age curtailing the earlier rise in youth crime and fall in test scores—yet heard themselves denounced as so wild and stupid as to put The Nation At Risk.
I’d rather walk to school uphill both ways for five miles than to be abused.
PS, I do acknowledge that all generations have had their personal hell. Let’s put this whole argument to rest by being happy that our children will have more advantages than we did.
“I was born in a paper sack
In the bottom of a sewer.
I had to eat dirt clods for breakfast,
My family was so poor!
My daddy was a waitress;
My momma sold bathroom tile;
My brothers and sisters all hated me
'Cuz I was an only child.”
A comedian - Richard Jeni? - does the funniest take on this I’ve ever heard. It goes a something like this:
Arms? We didn’t have arms when I was growing up. We had to use our tongues to open doors, hail cabs, etc.
Food? We didn’t have food back in my day. We had to eat lint. Sucked it right off the carpet, out of our pockets, and in times of real need, we’d go for bellybuttons.
That’s right, I come from a family of armless lint-suckers. AND WE WERE HAPPY!
Most common question I ask: “What?”
Most common question I get: “Are you really hearing impaired?”