How come we didn't die from penny candy and other things?

What are some “other things” you mention?

My mom tells me about some crazy toys she and my uncle used to play with. Like Jarts for example. They used to just throw them at each other, forget about the in the air part. Then again she used to chase him around the house with a kitchen knife, and he shot her with BBs on purpose.

I love the way you put the question: wonderful visual. :o)

My answer is simply that we survived because we were exposed to all those germs, in small doses. It let our bodies build up a healthy resistance.

@Allie, they’re in the second paragraph. But we also rode bikes, skated, and everything else without helmets, rode in cars without seat belts and kids’ car seats, played in playgrounds with seesaws and high swings, used inflatable toys at the beach, and much, much more.

Someone got hurt now and then, yes, but just like people growing up with fireplaces and wood stoves or with horses and guns and all manner of other potentially dangerous things, people learned what to watch out for. Parents and older siblings taught the young ones, kids learned what they needed to know, and people took responsibility for themselves. When accidents happened, nobody thought of suing anyone. There was no general belief that if you get hurt, somebody owes you money, or that injury was a quick road to the riches you deserved. But this, I admit, is a digression. Sorry.

true, and we also lived in homes full of mold and lead based paint

@Jeruba Oh, sorry. All those sounded like germs and I wasn’t sure if there was more or not.

@joni1977, true. And we didn’t have polio vaccine or MMR and DPT immunization. But I was thinking more about risks we took with our behavior than about environmental things. It’s not as if germs have been eradicated. But imagine the horror if people bought and sold candy that way in the U.S. today.

I suspect we just learned to be careful while toughening our hides and immune systems. Centuries of evolution resulted in bodies and coping mechanisms that make us generally pretty good at surviving our environments. Also, I imagine we didn’t have as many environmental toxins. There was lead in our paint, but we didn’t have as many chemicals in all our everyday products and radio waves everywhere, either. It’s hard to say what exactly is causing so many of the cancers and other diseases that are plaguing us nowadays, partially because there are so many factors to eliminate as potential sources. I wish I knew the answer to that one. Could be Mother Nature thinning the herd, who knows?

“What doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.” Nietzsche

because we live in a bull shit society where everything is a big deal…

I rememeber sliding down metal slides and having a playground filled with fun stuff… the PC bullshit world we live in ruins children… plastic everything?

Oh I liked those slides, but in summer they sure did burn your ass. Still fun.

I’m not scared of germs; I can’t be, given where I live. I hold a subway pole with my bare hands at least 8 times a week. I’ve eaten in “hole in the wall” restaurants where I sometimes wonder if the Health Department skipped the inspection for a nice bribe.

And I’m just old enough to remember dangerous toys, exploring railroad depots, climbing huge trees, etc. I used to ride horsey swings at the playground from the front, and urge the other kid to pump higher so I could leap off like an acrobat. How I didn’t crack my skull open is a miracle.

Any of us past 40 (not me quite yet) actually has it pretty good, considering the average life expectancy early last century for a non-rich person was about 40. We aren’t being worked to death or forced to bear so many kids that we’re weakened.

@Allie haha I do remember that especially in the short ass shorts we wore as kids in the 80’s but the best part was flying down them! I do remember getting my ass kicked by them but when your a kid you should be able to get hurt and still have fun…

Oh and some of those see-saws, swings and slides were on top of cement. Even my ‘safe’ school yard playground was built on top of gravel. No mulch or rubber filled playgrounds for us!

@augustlan yes!! danger…

@augustlan – I just remembered the monkey bars! No wood chips to pad a fall, concrete.

What the hell were those people thinking?

@aprilsimnel Wood chips can be dangerous too. In first grade a piece went through my shoe and directly into my foot. I couldn’t even take off my shoe, it had to be cut off at the doctor’s office.

ouch

Owwie! Ow!

Often, the more infectious the disease, the less deadly it is. Nobody is going to die from herpes, but it spreads through contact and it resides within one’s nerve cells making it impossible to destroy without killing the host cells.

Also, people in general are completely obsessed with things that they can’t see. Now that germ theory is well underway and that most people accept that certain bacteria can make a person ill, they will try to avoid that with the technology available.

I recently saw a commercial for a vaccum cleaner with an ultra-violet light on the bottom for the explicit purpose of killing bacteria lying in one’s carpet. I had a laugh as one woman in the commercial (paid actor or not, it doesn’t matter) said something to the effect of “I feel good knowing that I’m killing things that I can’t see.”

@Allie – Wow, they cut your whole foot off because of a wood chip! Guess that shows how dangerous our lifestyles really were : )

When’s the last time you saw a bunch of kids playing a neighborhood game of baseball or soccer out in the street? Playing now involves an adult coach, schedules, car pool, etc.

Also kids were allowed to get in fights and scuffles and it wasn’t a big deal; now many schools have a zero tolerance policy and expel/heavily reprimand kids for even shoving each other around.

Kids who are protected from germs and live in überclean houses often have troubles with allergies later. Their immune systems weren’t programmed to realize that not every “invader” is malicious and so they react to everything as if it were. Perhaps those candy germs gave you a functioning immune system, keeping you more alive and well than someone whose parents worry about such things.

The old saying is “You’ll eat a peck of dirt before you die” The human body is a wonderful thing. When it is fully functioning it can fight off some pretty serious invaders. Even when something new and deadly comes along, the first thing it does is start to build up immunities that can eventually blunt the killer effects.

In the recent food poisoning cases we see that it is the very old or the very young who die. In the peanut/salmonella case almost every one who died were senior citizens, several in one old folks home. Most people who were infected probably wrote it off as a 24 hour ‘bug’. In a tainted hamburger case, whole families ate the burgers but only 2–3 yos died.

@fireside Yes, I’m one-footed now. Such a sad story.

@elchoopanebre, damn right. I was so incensed when my first-grader was hauled in and suspended, not once but twice—once because he was at the end of a line of kids that were pushing, and when the domino effect got to him he accidentally knocked another kid down; a second time when he saw a fifth-grade girl (a known bully and crybaby) picking on a second grader—and my little guy didn’t like it, so he shoved the older girl, who was twice his size. He shoved her right in front and knocked her on her butt. He didn’t even know what a “chest” was. But she screamed and was taken to the nurse’s office (unhurt), and my 6-year-old was accused of sexual assault.

What made me especially angry was that vigilante justice and sticking up for the underdog and taking down bullies are among the most celebrated American values, seen in cartoons and movies, comic books and children’s books everywhere you turn, and my son just thought he was protecting a weak victim from an overpowering menace. In another day, before PC and rampant litigation, that schoolyard story would have had a different ending.

A first-grader accused of sexual assualt for that? What the hell have we created in our quest for safety and protection?!?

I know, I thought it was nuts too. I told him I was proud of him.

He didn’t even know the two kids. When asked what he had shoved her for, he said he saw her picking on the second-grader (who was also bigger than he was) and that he didn’t like it. I defended him stoutly to the principal, who said it didn’t matter, we were not to lay our hands on any part of another student’s body for any reason and that he had deliberately pushed her in the chest, which made it sexual.

This child had a rough trip all the way through school.

But how about that first-or second-grader in Florida or someplace who was expelled for pointing his finger at another kid and saying “bang,” or the one who got busted for kissing a little girl in his class? What fun would first grade have been if some little boy hadn’t kissed some little girl? My older boy kissed a girl on the second day of kindergarten and came home and announced that they were engaged. I’ll bet she still remembers it with delight! Thanks heavens that was before schools got this nutty in their fear of lawsuits.

Pushing someone away is definitionally not assault. It’s an act of defense. Their rationale makes no sense.

If he had pushed her to the ground, then groped her, that would be a different story.

The principal explicitly said that self-defense was not allowed. Even if someone struck you, you were not permitted to strike back, and you would be punished if you did. My questions about legal and constitutional rights were not appreciated. In their little fiefdoms, these rulers are gods. We did take one case all the way to the district, with lawyers and transcripts and everything, and we won, but that was years later and a more serious (though equally groundless) charge.

@Jeruba – What was the other charge? Now I’m curious….

That was his older brother. In seventh grade he and other star members of the science class were sent out back to dismantle a class engineering project, a bridge made out of PVC pipe. They were busily bashing and stomping it and tossing pieces in the dumpster, no doubt clowning around some as kids will, and my son playfully tossed aside a piece he thought he’d like to keep. A lurking VP materialized and accused him of having a weapon on campus and threatening the safety of others, including menacing a cafeteria worker that she claimed had been standing by the dumpster—a sheer fabrication that everyone knew was false (no one was there). It was her opinion that the piece of white plastic tubing resembled a gun.

My son was suspended for three days and forced by the suspension to miss doing his final English presentation and take a major hit on his grade. It was the end of the school year—no time for make-up. He was also forbidden to attend the last school dance of the year.

He went home and burnt his school pride shirt, which he had received as an award for citizenship.

We fought that one all the way and received a written apology from the district. The following year the VP and her principal (who, when my son had asked to tell his side of the story, responded that he’d heard the VP’s account and didn’t need to know anything else) were quietly transferred to another school.

Then there was the time the younger one was seized and held for arrest by a police officer on campus for violating the terms of his suspension—he’d been told on March 7th “not to come back until three-ten,” and he went back on campus after school was out to see a teacher about his homework, thinking three-ten was a time, not a date.

These are nothing compared with the horror stories I’ve heard some parents tell. And my kids were never troublemakers or disciplinary problems. Is it any wonder that kids come through school learning to hate and despise authority and to feel that the whole social system is the enemy? If you can be a marked criminal by the age of six, what’s the use of trying to stay within the law?

Gosh, I didn’t mean for this innocent question to turn into a rant about injustice, but it is all of a piece. Human nature has not changed in the past half-century, but social attitudes are, in my opinion, breeding more problems than they solve. Trying to anticipate everything that could go wrong anywhere, making a law or a rule about it, and exhibiting zero tolerance toward any perceived infraction (in effect giving carte blanche to those doing the perceiving) is costing us more than it is worth. Where do we get the idea that life is an experience in which nothing can be allowed to go wrong?

And that does tie back into the original question.

my english teacher went on like a 30 minute rant the other day about how little kids aren’t allowed to get into little fights anymore. i agree with her. i’m not violent in the least, but i think that the extent they go to now when there’s a little scuffle is ridiculous. especially when it’s defense! so many kids get suspended because they attempted to defend themselves against another kid who shoved them or something to that effect.
sometimes i really think that sensibility is a lost art.

And yet where were all those watchers when my fourth grader—yes, the vigilante—got pounded by a gang of four or five older kids every day because he consistently stuck up for a kid that the others were teasing?

Little fights may not feel little to little kids.

and Jeruba – I hope the Principal at least threw the book at those kids, too?

No. The teacher said she couldn’t be everywhere and she was really sorry she couldn’t pay more attention to the gifted kid in her class while she had her hands full with the troublemakers and maybe things would be better the following year. By which time my child was diagnosably depressed and headed for ten years of hell.

And the kid he’d been defending joined the gang as soon as they invited him, and no one stuck up for my son.

But… but… we are not to lay our hands on any part of another student’s body for any reason! <sigh> stupid crap…

Nobody wearing a yellow security jacket saw it. When we complained, we were told that it was up to my son to go for help. He said, “How am I supposed to do that when there are five guys on top of me?” He was also younger and smaller because he skipped a grade. A natural target.

Ugh. People suck.

People have just gotten more nansy pansy. There were many things that really were not as frightening as the media made it seem; not wearing a seat belt, riding in the bed of a truck or the back cargo area of the station wagon. I remember all that, and doing that when I was a kid and I am still here. Money is one of the filthiest things you can handle and yet no one really washes their hands right after touching it. When I was a kid you didn’t have to pump your own gas and now people do it all the time, they don’t think about what chemicals from the gas, etc, they are getting on their hands or how many people have touched the pump before them. I think we are only preoccupied with all this is because lawyers got involved because someone wanted to make a mishap into a payday. I remember when I was in High School there were a few teachers who took us (who were in their class) out to the gun range one weekend for shooting and pic nic. Parents would have a cow today of something like that. They were all expert gun owners and we were never in any danger the whole time we were there. They set the rules and we followed them or we touched not a bullet. We shot 12 gauges, .44 and .347 magnums, 45s, hunting rifles, 38s and had a blast and learned a healthy respect for fire arms and what they could do if you were not careful. Today everyone want a CMB cover my butt, in areas we don’t need to be we act like old ladies and frail men.