Columnists
The good old days
Okay, let’s just stop for a moment and think about all of the dumb-arse stuff we pass around on social media. Are you thinking about it? Good. So here’s what I’m thinking: “Yes, if you’re reading this and you’re older than 45, you probably survived things like drinking from a garden hose, or eating stuff that was undercooked/ not washed/cross-contaminated, or rode your bike without a helmet and didn’t have a carseat or a seatbelt, or all of those things and more.” Consider yourself fortunate if you can string a sentence together. A lot of kids didn’t make it to adulthood because the upset tummy was food poisoning and the headache was a concussion and the windshield isn’t a great way to stop a bodyin- motion. Just stop talking about how we had it so much better.
In 1950 the average lifespan of a North American was around 68 years. Yessiree, we were drinking and smoking and stuffing the fat-laden foods down our throats at alarming rates. Additionally, we worked and lived in dangerous places. Workplace safety and health were just a pipe dream in the good old days. If you didn’t die from a toxic work environment, your life was put to the test in a home filled with asbestos, lead, volatile cleaning products and low building code standards. In the good old days we were just making the real connection between heart disease, lifestyle and diet. In the 1950s, my granny was in her sixties. When I look at the photographs of her from that time, I see an elderly, overweight, whitehaired woman who could barely manage the stairs to the second floor of her house. She chain-smoked, she loved a bit of bread fried in bacon or sausage grease and her idea of a balanced meal was boiled potatoes, minced meat (she didn’t have any of her own teeth) and a cup of tea, followed by a shot of rye whisky and a roll-yer-own. She had lived her good-old-days when she was in her teens and twenties. Two of her children didn’t make it past infancy, and all of her children were born at home, assisted by my great aunt and the lady who lived next door. They had no way to deal with a medical emergency. My grandfather worked 60 to 70 hours a week. He, like my granny, had lost his teeth when he was in his early twenties. He smoked. He drank, a lot. He wasn’t familiar with fresh vegetables and fruit. While he was a lot more agile than my grandmother, he certainly had his share of health concerns directly related to his lifestyle. A lifestyle many lived in “the good old days”.
In the good old days, children with learning or physical challenges were often shipped off to institutions where many of them were treated to sterilization or lobotomization because you never know how dangerous they might have been to the world. For those of us who were “smart enough” to go to school, in the good old days we sat at our desks and listened to a teacher (who may have had a high school education) give a lesson on a concept so outdated it often made the students giggle. But in the good old days you sure as H E double hockey sticks wouldn’t laugh out loud in class, about anything. Teachers, in the good old days, were armed with chalk, pointers or yardsticks and they weren’t afraid to use them. And, no, we weren’t better because of corporal punishment. Ah, the good old days—polio, scarlet fever, meningitis, rubella, pertussis and sepsis. Let’s not forget about the good old days and the school dentist. The dentist who visited our school didn’t think kids felt pain, so no anaesthetic was administered while he drilled away, with a cigarette butt dangling over your face. The dental equipment could only be described as implements of torture salvaged from a medical tent, or worse, during WWI. Yep, I sure do miss the good old days. Wait. No I don’t. Not even one little toothless bit.
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