Cooties
I struggled with history class when I was a kid. When I asked my dad “why do I need to know all this stuff?” He told me I would be a piss poor conversationalist if I didn’t.
I took him at his word. Apparently he was wrong.
When I was 8 or 9 years old, around 1974, there was a lot of talk (some sensationalist, some a little more serious) about “the new Ice Age,” and I remember seeing illustrations of what it might look like when Manhattan would be covered by a glacier. This freaked me right out, and I worried for a while about never having summers as an adult.
Very few people talk about a new Ice Age these days, though the reality of climate changed turned out to be even more alarming.
This is why some people have a problem believing any of it. When I was a kid, we were told that the next Ice Age would be here soon. Later it was global warming. Now they call it climate change. There was a time when the biggest issue out there was the hole in the ozone layer. When was the last time you heard that as a news story?
Actually, the answer to this is “three weeks ago.” I saw the story in several news sources then:
I was told that strangers offering me drugs would be a big issue. Hasn’t seemed to be the case for me.
I always thought our grade school desks must be awesome if they would protect us from the inevitable nuclear strike. They were built “like a tank”, but glad I didn’t have to test them out.
Oh, definitely. “Permanent record” was the most ominous phrase imaginable when I was a kid. I really believed a mysterious file in the school office was going to follow me my whole life. I wish I had known that, unless you’re running for President, nobody gives a shit what you did in school and there’s probably no record of any of it anyway.
That reminds me of Shakespeare denialists who say, “There’s no evidence that Shakespeare went to public school!” Hell, there’s probably no evidence that I did either.
And the small number of times I was offered weed (usually by a friend of a friend, not a random stranger), a quick “no thanks” was sufficient to end the discussion. There was definitely none of that “Come on, man, all the cool kids are doing it” peer pressure I was told there would be. It was more like they were just offering to share out of politeness rather than trying to pressure me into doing anything.
Killer bees. They were massing in South America and the swarm would make it to the lower 48 and put the kibosh on all of us. All the more so for me: I was ( and am ) allergic to bee stings.
40 years later, they must have lost their way, or their swarm dispersed in a hurricane.
My dad was left deaf in one ear by scarlet fever. His 5 year old sister died of it. It was no joke then, it was the covid of its time. Families feared it. Penicillin resolved most of those issues. Then polio was the dreaded disease.
Jeez, sex is about the only thing that turned out to be even better than I hoped. Still is.
I worried far too much about bad breath, though. Same for B.O. Turns out that not smoking plus brushing/flossing/bathing made those non-issues.
Until WW II, when penicillin came out, and for still-unknown reasons, the causative organism reduced dramatically in virulence, scarlet fever was indeed a fearsome disease that sometimes killed all of a family’s children in a matter of days. My mother got it when she was 6 years old, in 1940, and was in quarantine (only Grandma and their doctor could see her) and everything she handled had to be boiled, or destroyed by burning.
When I was a kid, having a tonsillectomy was written about like it was some kind of adventure, and in many circles, it was still considered a childhood rite of passage. I know now that it was described that way to make children less fearful of the whole thing.
And yeah, quicksand isn’t a common hazard, and the Bermuda Triangle has been largely debunked.
I started a thread about this very topic some time back.
People dropping in unannounced is also not the thing it presumably used to be, either. When I was growing up, the house always had to look like something out of BH&G in case this happened, which it didn’t.
I do remember telling my nieces that we need to study history, because we need to know where we came from in order to plan where we’re going.
Yeah, we now have murder hornets, but they’re only living in a small section of the Pacific Northwest, and nests are destroyed as officials find them, because they are an invasive species.
Having to specify “no anchovies” at the pizzeria.
Related to this, when I was a little kid (like 5 or 6) I was certain I was going to die in an atomic bomb explosion.
My parents belonged to a bridge club. Once a week, they would go to some other couple’s house to play bridge for a few hours. Roughly every month, it would be our turn to host, and it would be my job to set up the card tables in the living room.
I very much wanted to learn to play bridge, because I associated it with being “grown up.” I assumed that when I became an adult, I would also join a bridge club, and socialize with other adults in that same way.
I suppose there are still people who play bridge, but I don’t know any of them, and I never did learn how to play. It seems like those sorts of regular “get-togethers” aren’t as much of a thing anymore.
I’ve shared this in other threads, but my parents, too, were frequent bridge players, when I was kid in the '70s it was the social glue that held their group of friends together, and they played several evenings a month.
My dad wanted me to learn bridge, insisting that it would be something that I’d find was often played among my classmates in college, because that’d been his experience, 30 years earlier; he also felt that it would be an important social skill to have after college, again, because it was for him (and for my mother). I wasn’t interested in learning, and when I got to college, I found very few people who played bridge, and I still know very few people of my age group who even know how to play bridge, much less are regular players.
Instead, I was playing D&D in college, which is still what I play with my friends when we get together socially. 