| date: | Wed, Sep 2, 2015 at 11:48 AM | ||
| subject: | Fwd: FW: Wasn't this us? |
Subject: Wasn't this us?
Thought you'd appreciate....
WASN'T THIS US?
A little house with three bedrooms,
One bathroom and one car on the street.
A mower that you had to push
To make the grass look neat.
In the kitchen on the wall
We only had one phone,
And no need for recording things,
Someone was always home.
We only had a living room
Where we would congregate,
Unless it was at mealtime
In the kitchen where we ate.
We had no need for family rooms
Or extra rooms to dine.
When meeting as a family
Those two rooms would work out fine.
We only had one TV set
And channels maybe two,
But always there was one of them
With something worth the view.
For snacks we had potato chips
That tasted like a chip.
And if you wanted flavor
There was Lipton's onion dip.
Store-bought snacks were rare because
My mother liked to cook
And nothing can compare to snacks
In Betty Crocker's book.
Weekends were for family trips
Or staying home to play.
We all did things together --
Even go to church to pray.
When we did our weekend trips
Depending on the weather,
No one stayed at home because
We liked to be together.
Sometimes we would separate
To do things on our own,
But we knew where the others were
Without our own cell phone.
Then there were the movies
With your favorite movie star,
And nothing can compare
To watching movies in your car.
Then there were the picnics
At the peak of summer season,
Pack a lunch and find some trees
And never need a reason.
Get a baseball game together
With all the friends you know,
Have real action playing ball --
And no game video.
Remember when the doctor
Used to be the family friend,
And didn't need insurance
Or a lawyer to defend?
The way that he took care of you
Or what he had to do,
Because he took an oath and strived
To do the best for you.
Remember going to the store
And shopping casually,
And when you went to pay for it
You used your own money.
Nothing that you had to swipe
Or punch in some amount,
And remember when the cashier person
Had to really count?
The milkman used to go
From door to door,
And it was just a few cents more
Than going to the store.
There was a time when mailed letters
Came right to your door,
Without a lot of junk mail ads
Sent out by every store.
The mailman knew each house by name
And knew where it was sent;
There were not loads of mail addressed
To "present occupant."
There was a time when just one glance
Was all that it would take,
And you would know the kind of car,
The model and the make.
They didn't look like turtles
Trying to squeeze out every mile;
They were streamlined, white walls, fins
And really had some style.
One time the music that you played
Whenever you would jive,
Was from a vinyl, big-holed record
Called a forty-five.
The record player had a post
To keep them all in line
And then the records would drop down
And play one at a time.
Oh sure, we had our problems then,
Just like we do today
And always we were striving,
Trying for a better way.
Oh, the simple life we lived
Still seems like so much fun,
How can you explain a game,
Just kick the can and run?
And why would boys put baseball cards
Between bicycle spokes
And for a nickel, red machines
Had little bottled Cokes?
This life seemed so much easier
And slower in some ways.
I love the new technology
But I sure do miss those days.
So time moves on and so do we
And nothing stays the same,
But I sure love to reminisce
And walk down memory lane.
With all today's technology
We grant that it's a plus!
But it's fun to look way back and say,
Hey look, guys, THAT WAS US!
Posts
18 comments:
Random thoughts regarding this ode-to-a-time-that-never-was...
Yes, I remember records....I bought one just yesterday. I own a couple thousand of them.
Junk mail subsidizes First Class Mail; it's why you don't pay $1 to mail a letter. Of course back then, the cost of postage was subsidized by the government. Republicans did away with that, so you get junk mail now and pay a lot more for postage anyway.
My next door neighbor gets milk delivery; it's still a thing.
Doctors started to get insurance when people started suing them for malpractice.
I'll take watching movies in my home theater over watching movies in the car every time, thank you.
Yes, I remember only getting a couple of TV channels. I also remember terrible reception from analog transmission...in black and white. You miss that, Right Wing Dad?
Right Wing Dad really misses retail that didn't have inventory control and cash registers that weren't capable of determining the amount of change owed? I'll grant that retailers should probably still teach their cashiers to count change, but it's faster the way it's done now.
Cars stopped having fins when people no longer wanted to buy cars with fins. You want a car with fins? They're all over eBay.
Most of what this horrible poem talks about is a lifestyle that only existed for a small part of the population and was more or less destroyed by the Republican attacks on unions. In the 1950s, an auto worker could raise a family and own a home while being the only one who had to go to work. In this post-union era, everyone has to work, so no one's ever home.
Oh, and in 1957, back in the days before birth control and sex education in schools, 10% of teenage girls aged 15-19 in the United States were pregnant. Do you miss that, too?
Leave it to Beaver!
Ward, you were a little hard on the beaver last night.
No one's stopping RWD from living mostly like this. As usual, there's no there there.
Yeah right. Every single generation since humankind began bitches about how rotten things are now and how oh-so-wonderful they were when they were young bucks. But somehow, that paradigm is thrown out as these gits claim that their own heyday really was the best.
They say that nostalgia is in fact memory lane without any of the potholes. Well that would explain the cherry-picking of the author of this screed. Alluding to CharlieE's comments; I'm struck by how the author of this sees absolutely no irony in the fact he's barking up the wrong tree as to the source of his lament. Which is to say he assigns zero blame to the supply -side ( aka "trickle-down" ) economics that the right wing literally worships, and this system's corrosive effect on the idyllic life of the working class the author pines for.
Another, albeit anecdotal, observation: Based on the right wingers that plague my life, my own dad and many others, these people are among the most materialistic gadget freaks addicted to modern conveniences I've ever met in my life. Simpler times my eye.
I'm just amazed that somewhere in that doggerel the author didn't manage to blame Obama for all of RWD's nostalgia butt hurt.
Thanks Obama!
Oh come on you MEANIE Liberal WEENIES....don't rain on my nostalgia parade!!!!! woooooooooooo-hoooooooooooo
Mike Hawk
CharlieE - Your next door neighbor gets "MILK" delivery at home in 2016??? Where da' hell do you live?
Dang, your neighborhood mailman must be putting in OT baby!!! lmao
At least someone is getting LAID. Don't get jealous, CharlieE.
Mike Hawk
I don't much care for nostalgia. Never have. I don't like watching home movies\ videos and I don't spend much time thinking of the past at all. I'm not sure if that's normal or not. And while I enjoyed the first couple of reminiscences in this poem, it became annoying dreck very quickly. Why does RWD seem to revile the present so much? And did he really think the past was so great way back when it was the present? I'm betting No on that one.
CharlieE had some of the same takeaways I had from this. However, this whole thing could have been summed up in one block and saved everyone a lot of reading:
Remember way back when
In that golden age
Before that n*%%^r in our White House
Was the target of our rage?
Apologies since the slur IS offensive but quite frankly it is the only word that accurately reflects the mindset of the GOP base. They'll deny it or course then rant about how it was the Democrats back in the day that were the REAL racists, then turn around and forward much less subtle racial memes and RWFs. I know because I get them in my inbox daily...appropriately from old white dudes.
Max
*of course
@Mike Hawk
CharlieE - Your next door neighbor gets "MILK" delivery at home in 2016??? Where da' hell do you live?
In a suburb of a city in the western United States with a metropolitan area of about two million people. My neighbor receives milk, cheese, eggs, bacon, and occasionally, produce, delivered once a week.
https://www.winderfarms.com/how-it-works
BTW - I'm getting laid, plenty, if you must know. Mrs. CharlieE is pretty hot. Don't get jealous.
@Agent86:
You commentators on this blog are the only ones that preach racial injustice and bring up how everyone is against Obama because he is "that n*%%^r" or/or blackity, blackity, black, black.
You are not looking for solutions or harmony, you all are just wanting to bitch and moan and be cute with your writing and word choice so you can see your own words in writing.
You liberals are so easily amused by your supposedly superior intellect. I'm calling bullshit.
THE ANTILIBERAL
Hey CharlieE, I did not know that you had named your blowup doll Mrs. CharlieE. Dang.
Just make sure to have the holes disinfected every once in a while, for your own safety.
Mike Hawk
Antiliberal/Mike...post three minutes apart. Seriously?? LMAO. You're pathetic. Go fuck yourself and the jackass you rode in on. I didn't vote for Obama and I have plenty of valid reasons why. So riddle me this: if all of the vitriol from the right-wing base is not because he's black, then why...oh WHY can't you assclowns have civil discourse, which we know is demonstrably way outside your wheelhouse amigo, about about ANY policies or actions he's done other than throw out racially charged epithets, memes, forwards or drop the Godwin's bomb? Cue the crickets....
Nevermind, don't bother responding because you couldn't have an intelligent thought if your life depended on it. You'll just throw out some sophomoric bullshit and throw in a couple of ad hominems.
Max
"antiliberal"
What a fucking laugh.
You wouldn't know what a liberal was even if he gave you a well paying job and offered you a glass of clean water to drink. Ask your corporate masters what a liberal is and he'll say 'the enemy'.
Why?
Mike Hawk said...
Hey CharlieE, I did not know that you had named your blowup doll Mrs. CharlieE. Dang.
Yet again, Mike Hawk demonstrates that he has nothing of value to offer here. If it weren't for attacks on other people who comment on this site, he'd have nothing to say at all.
Ding dong Scalia's DEAD!!
To quote the immortal Jimi Hendrix: Scuse me while I kiss the sky!
And The Blacks stayed on their side of town.
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