Reported as spam.
Hope the OP’s forthcoming novel is more original.
Yeah, it was great to see those lynching in the south, and as for the Cuba crisis, how we laughed when we hid under the school desks.
Diptheria was a hoot if you managed to survive is, and kids don’t know what they are missing without polio to cripple one kid in school who had to live in leg braces and be called ‘spastic’. along with other charming epithets.
Wasn’t it great to have canned fish on the key unwound tins, all set to slice your fingers to shreds.
I still wish they had lead in petrol/gas, and in paint - reduced mental development is such fun!
Oh, and of course they had much better wars then, at least you had something to shoot at, and proper casualties, instead of maybe a few hundred we have nowadays. Sigh, I miss to good old multi million killers of yore .
You have to agree though, those women and wogs have gotten far too uppity these days.
Here’s my stock response to this:
WWII was clearly not a dangerous war because 100% of the survivors were not killed during their service.
Kids can’t play by themselves because of lawyers and government regulation? 
You ate worms and dirt? You guys have problems. I’m glad I was born in a more civilized time.
Clearly Bonner100 never had intestinal parasites.
What about snails? I like eating snails.
Those 3% are the ones who ate all the lead-based paint off of their cribs.
I knew a couple, in the 70s.
Which, incidentally, we used to eat! Fried in butter! And we didn’t care about nitrates or trans fats or gluten or mercury! And we drank lots of strong, bitter, cheap coffee that came out of a can, with lots of sugar, or that other stuff that gives rats cancer! And we liked it!
I’ve got a few minutes, so I’ll offer a blow-by-blow rebuttal to the latest drive-by poster who joined in the last 24 hours, here to shower us with nuggets of wisdom they got from a chain email.
[Spoiler]
And those that did not, didn’t get the opportunity to tell us about it.
And later died due to untreated undiagnosed diabetes.
And those babies which died aren’t here to tell us about how it made them tougher.
And the kids that got into that medicine and poisoned themselves aren’t here to tell us about the good ole days.
And those who suffered massive brain trauma and died, or who were kidnapped, raped, and tortured, and put in some psychopath’s basement dungeon, aren’t here to tell us of their wonderful experiences.
And those who died in car accidents with no safety devices are certainly glad they didn’t have such protections.
Made being rear-ended by a drunk driver a wonderful five second airborne experience ending with sudden and permanent unconsciousness.
And in some communities where the groundwater was tainted by the local chemical company having an accident, some people developed cancer and died. They are not here to tell us the heroic tale.
In your group, no one died. In another, someone had meningitis, and gave it to someone else, who died of meningitis.
Except, of course, the kids who were kidnapped and were eventually found in several heavy duty plastic bags on the side of the road. But it’s cool because at least they got some exercise and fresh air while they could. Now, kids have cell phones and might actually be able to call for help if they see one of their friends being abducted. Gives these kids a fighting chance against predators. But you’re right, the old way was better.
Ah yes, the wisdom of letting people get injured and die before spending any time thinking about safety. It’s a good thing your generation had so many kids, that’s what species have to do when so many of their kids end up dying. The unusual aspect about this is usually the young are killed by predators, not their own stupidity.
Now we can locate more people to be friends with, ones that actually share our interests. And we can do things which are more mentally stimulating than hoop 'n stick. Which stimulates our brains and gets us thinking critically and solving problems logically, and planning ahead. And learn about things which are part of a bigger world, with more information easily accessible to all, rather than our only source of wisdom being uncle frank who believes the CIA is stealing his brain waves.
Good thing broken necks are injuries that heal themselves fully over time.
We’re bragging about eating worms and dirt, as opposed to playing on a Playstation? Maybe you guys needed something that’s a lot more fun than eating dirt, but lacked the intelligence to think of anything better. Why is your generation considered so great again?
That’s good. It only counts as sound advice if everyone’s eyes got poked out.
And such things never happen today. Wow, learn something new every day.
Again, so different from today.
And violent crime rates have actually decreased since your time. They are just reported more due to a little thing called the internet.
So has literally every generation. Except mine has a higher rate of not dying due to our own stupidity.
The past 20 years have been a much faster explosion than the previous 30. Largely due to information reaching the public at large through the internet, and the stupidities of the past being exposed for what they are, and people learning not to repeat their parents’ mistakes. We don’t blame them, after all, they were practically cave men who ate dirt and worms and gave each other hepatitis. They did the best with the poor tools they had, and their unenlightened brains struggling to comprehend.
If you happened to die due to negligence, ignorance, apathy, or just a general lack of common sense or a basic amount of scientific knowledge, tough luck.
And while we’re at it, let’s take some time to remember all the lives that were so foolishly squandered due to taking unnecessary and stupid risks, and general ignorance, and remember that the moral of the story is that society advances by learning from and correcting the mistakes of the past. Thanks for trying, anyway. Your generation only exists because at some point, someone decided that we shouldn’t drink out of the same water that sick people shit in. You are a marginal improvement over medieval thinking. Enough of you survived to reproduce, and that is how natural selection works. Being dumb, yet lucky enough to not die in situations where you probably should have.
Intelligence means surviving by design rather than luck.[/Spoiler]
I challenge you to rebut.
I wish you a lucky day, it appears you need it.
TL;DR?
This guy already covered it pretty well here.
My aunt had polio as a child. She’s walked with a limp ever since. But thank god she didn’t have the GOVERNMENT telling her she couldn’t run around and play.
In the last 36 hours, I have seen this exact message, almost sort of but not quite word-for-word, here, in a Slate article linked to by Fark, in a video (complete with sappy music and slightly sarcastic-sounding narrator) posted on Facebook, and at least one other place that eludes me at the moment.
What the serious hell causes this?
You’ve had generations where they resolved conflicts by charging directly into musket fire over and over again, eventually learning that perhaps they should duck. And that’s how we learned that slavery is wrong.
You’ve had generations where they resolved conflicts by charging directly into machine gun fire over and over again, eventually learning that perhaps they should dig a hole to hide in, and not charge directly into the flying death projectiles. And that’s how we learned that imperialism was dead and people should govern themselves.
You’ve had generations where they resolved conflicts by coming up with bigger and bigger bombs. This generation was nearly stupid enough to cause worldwide thermonuclear war and the destruction of our species. Eventually learning to start dismantling these bombs before we kill ourselves to death. That’s how we learned that winning a war necessitates one side surviving it.
Now we have generations where most of the soldiers come home alive, because we send in robots to do things that usually result in death. What we’ve finally learned is that our lives are terrible things to waste, so maybe, just maybe, we should try to not die.
It only took us countless thousands of generations to learn this. Perhaps our newest generation can get it right.
But then you grew up to be fat and obese, with fat and obese children. Maybe if you had eaten better, these things wouldn’t have happened.
My niece Maia is very much like how I was. But unlike me, she has lots of friends. Her “helicopter” mother made sure to get her into a school for smart, high-achieving kids, while our hands-off parents believed that being a victim of bullying builds character.
Maia lives in a society where it’s cool for a girl to be a Game of Thrones geek that’s into roller derby and photography and science. She’s not the type who wants to hang out at the mall and go cruising for “boys”, like the “cool kids” used to do back in my day. She’s free to be herself in 2014…and so are the gay kids. For their sake, I would never go back to the 70s.
Yeah, don’t we have a rule somewhere against posting crap that you didn’t write yourself and not saying where you got it from?
Actually helmets suck and I prefer riding without one. I ride with one because, yanno, head injuries, but they suck.
Yeah, a sucky helmet is better than dead.
Isn’t this list basically the lyrics to a bunch of country music songs?