If some of you younger folk wonder why some of us older folk get a little crusty, this might explain some of it

Looking back, it’s hard to believe that we have lived as long as we have.

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags. And, riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

Mom would put us on our stomach’s to sleep at night, and when we awoke our baby cribs were painted with bright colored lead-based paint. We often chewed on the crib, ingesting the paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes we had no helmets. We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the streetlights came on. We played dodge ball and sometimes the ball would really hurt. We played with toy guns, cowboys and Indians, army, cops and robbers, and used our fingers to simulate guns when the toy ones were not available.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank sugared pop, but we were never overweight; we were always outside playing.

Little league had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn’t had to learn to deal with disappointment. Some students weren’t as smart as others or didn’t work hard, so they failed a grade and were held back to repeat the same grade. That generation produced some of the greatest risk-takers and problem solvers. We had the freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all.

Almost all of us would rather go swimming in the lake instead of a pristine pool.

We all took gym, not PE – and risked permanent injury with a pair of high-top Ked’s instead of having cross-training athletic shoes with air-cushion soles and built-in light reflectors.

Speaking of school, we all said prayers and the pledge. Amazing we aren’t all brain dead from that, and staying in detention after school caught all sorts of negative attention for about the next two weeks. Schools didn’t offer 14-year-olds an abortion or condoms (we wouldn’t have known what either was anyway) but they did give us a couple of baby aspirin and cough syrup if we started getting the sniffles.

People were supposed to accomplish something before they were allowed to be proud of themselves.

We were taught profanity and dirty words were a sign of a limited mind trying to express itself, not "free speech".

Children played “king of the hill” on piles of gravel left on vacant construction sites and when we got hurt, Mom pulled out the 48-cent bottle of Mercurochrome and then we got butt-whooped. Now it’s a trip to the emergency room, followed by a 10-day dose of a $49 bottle of antibiotics and then Mom calls the attorney to sue the contractor for leaving a horrible pile of gravel where it was such a threat.

Mom invited the door-to-door salesman inside for coffee, kids choked down the dust from the gravel driveway while playing with Tonka trucks (remember why Tonka trucks were made tough … it wasn’t so that they could take the rough berber in the family room).

To top it off, not a single person had ever been told that they were from a dysfunctional family. People were obviously so duped by so many societal ills, that they didn’t even notice that the entire country wasn’t taking Prozac.

How did we survive?