# Black and White



## Casper (Dec 14, 2013)

_*


Black and White?
*__*(Under the age of 40? You won't understand.)*_
_*

My mum used to cut chicken, chop eggs and spread butter on bread on the same cutting board with the same knife and no bleach, but we didn't get food poisoning.

Our school sandwiches were wrapped in wax paper in a brown paper bag, not in ice pack coolers, but I can't remember getting e.coli

Almost all of us would have rather gone swimming in the lake or at the beach instead of a pristine pool (talk about boring), no beach closures then.
We all took PE ..... and risked permanent injury with a pair of Dunlop sandshoes instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air cushion soles and built in light reflectors that cost as much as a small car. I can't recall any injuries but they must have happened because they tell us how much safer we are now.

We got the cane for doing something wrong at school, they used to call it discipline yet we all grew up to accept the rules and to honour & respect those older than us.

Funny how we had 20-42 kids in our class, one teacher, no teachers' aids and he or she never had to raise their voice to us because we were all disciplined at home and already knew about respect.

We all learned to use a pen or pencil to write properly, read, do maths and spell almost all the words needed to write a grammatically correct letter....... FUNNY THAT!!

We all said prayers in school and sang the national anthem, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention.

At the end of every term, we had an exam and the teacher made a comment about us on the exam report we took home. If we didn’t pass the final yearly exam, we stayed in the same class rather than go up to the next class. No assessment of encouragement if we couldn’t handle the work. I thought that I was supposed to accomplish something before I was allowed to be proud of myself.

I just can't recall how bored we were without computers, Play Station, Nintendo, X-box or 270 digital TV cable stations. We were too busy using our imagination and playing with our friends outside to even think about being bored.

Oh yeah ... and where was the antibiotics and sterilisation kit when I got that bee sting? I could have been killed!

We played “King of the Hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant building sites and when we got hurt, mum pulled out the 2/6p bottle of iodine and then we got our backside spanked.Now it's a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10 day dose of antibiotics and then mum calls the lawyer to sue the contractor for leaving a horribly vicious pile of gravel where it was such a threat.
*_
_*To top it off, not a single person I knew had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family.

How could we possibly have known that?

We never needed to get into group therapy and/or anger management classes.

We were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that we didn't even notice that the entire country wasn't taking Prozac!

How did we ever survive?

LOVE TO ALL OF US WHO SHARED THIS ERA.
AND TO ALL WHO DIDN'T, SORRY FOR WHAT YOU MISSED.
I WOULDN'T TRADE IT FOR ANYTHING! *_

_*

Pass this to someone and remember that life's most simple pleasures are very often the best.

AAAAh, those WERE the days!!!!
*_


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## SeaBreeze (Dec 14, 2013)

Thanks for sharing that Casper, every word rings true.  Love to you and all of us here who shared this era...I agree, would not have traded it for anything!! :cool1:


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## drifter (Dec 14, 2013)

Works for me. I shared the same experiences except for the prayer in school. But I could have handled that too.


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## Jillaroo (Dec 14, 2013)

_Loved it Casper_:bowknot::thankyou:


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## Warrigal (Dec 14, 2013)

I can relate to it all too, even the prayer in public school if you call singing hymns in assembly prayer. 
We sang _God Save the King _(later the Queen) and the _23rd Psalm_, and on Anzac Day we sang _Abide With Me _and verses from Kipling's Recessional which began _God of Our Fathers, known of old_..


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## babyboomer (Dec 15, 2013)

In 70-s i bought my first telephone answering machine. It had loop tape and ability of 2 1messages recieved. then I bought answering service, where i could read messages from the public or any phone.After that tghere was pager 9or bleeper) , then analogue car phone, digital phone.. fax, and now email.. are we more of slaves..?/
Our grand mothers were washing by hand, clothes.. and dishes.. nowdays .. woomen say (along machines) "Im exsausted.!"
But then

I remember the times when 20 litre round garbage bin went on collection days 3/4 empty, on the embankment.
Now days we have the green (garden waste), the yellow (recyclabes) and the red (household waste) bins, and often we cant cope, we put excesive waist in naighbours bin. The shit we buy is packed and prepacked. Often, the package cost more than ingreddience. Then if you look in the loading  dock of the Supermarket, there are discarded pallets, and the cartons pressed. We pay for that as well.Can we change it??


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## Diwundrin (Dec 15, 2013)

Well that's been saved to the' keepers' archive, thanks Cas.

When I feel sorry for younger people who missed the firmer, 'realer' grounding we had growing up, I remember what someone said.  "Today is the good old days to them, they won't miss what they never knew."  True.


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## Pappy (Dec 15, 2013)

I don't think we had prayer in the classroom, but we did have religious instructions on Wed. And went to a church for this. The rest of your post sure rings true.


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## SeaBreeze (Dec 15, 2013)

I went to a Catholic grammar school, so we had prayer every day...and on weekends.


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## Casper (Dec 15, 2013)

_*Similar circumstances for me SB.....For 10 years I went to a Catholic girls' 
college/convent where we had prayers before each lesson, if I remember 
correctly.....we were also taught mainly by some hard-ass nuns who kept us in line....:gettowork:
*_


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## Diwundrin (Dec 15, 2013)

I can't even remember about that prayer thing, don't think it was every day but it obviously didn't make any impression on me either way.  I remember hymns being sung on occasion but can't remember the context.  I used to dodge 'scripture lessons' once a week but it was a government public school so religion wasn't a big deal there.


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## Casper (Dec 15, 2013)

_*Di.....It was different at Catholic schools in those days. It put me off religion completely as the nuns used to quiz me every Monday to see if I'd gone to Mass on Sunday, they were very persistent. I did go a few times but I'd had enough and found it very boring so when I finished school at 14, my dad, who'd been an altar boy in his youth, told me to make my own decision whether I wanted to continue going or not......guess what I chose? We were never a "religious" family but those nuns really  turned me against it. *_


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