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My wife sent this to me and really made me look back as to what it was like when I was young. We were constantly blowing up and burning stuff( army men burnt well). I even took off school to hunt with my dad for geese out at Eagle Lake. I was told a story by the owners of Camp Rio Vista in Ingram Texas, in the 30s and 40s the campers would jump on the back pf a flatbed truck and drive the 100 miles to Mexico for fun, can you imagine the law suites today, how times have changed for the worse. What was something that you did that would be not acceptable today
School -- 1957 vs. 2007

Scenario: Jack goes quail hunting before school, pulls into school parking lot with shotgun in gun rack.
1957 - Vice Principal comes over, looks at Jack's shotgun, goes to his car and gets his shotgun to show Jack.
2007 - School goes into lock down, FBI called, Jack hauled off to jail and never sees his truck or gun again. Counselors called in for traumatized students and teachers.

Scenario: Johnny and Mark get into a fistfight after school.
1957 - Crowd gathers. Mark wins. Johnny and Mark shake hands and end up buddies.
2007 - Police called, SWAT team arrives, arrests Johnny and Mark. Charge them with assault, both expelled even though Johnny started it.

Scenario: Jeffrey won't be still in class, disrupts other students.
1957 - Jeffrey sent to office and given a good paddling by the Principal. Returns to class, sits still and does not disrupt class again.
2007 - Jeffrey given huge doses of Ritalin. Becomes a zombie. Tested for ADD. School gets extra money from state because Jeffrey has a disability.

Scenario: Billy breaks a window in his neighbor's car and his Dad gives him a whipping with his belt.
1957 - Billy is more careful next time, grows up normal, goes to college, and becomes a successful businessman.
2007 - Billy's dad is arrested for child abuse. Billy removed to foster care and joins a gang. State psychologist tells Billy's sister that she remembers being abused herself and their dad goes to prison. Billy's mom has affair with psychologist.

Scenario: Mark gets a headache and takes some aspirin to school.
1957 - Mark shares aspirin with Principal out on the smoking dock.
2007 - Police called, Mark expelled from school for drug violations. Car searched for drugs and weapons.

Scenario: A foreign student fails high school English.
1957 - He goes to summer school, passes English, goes to college.
2007 – His cause is taken up by state. Newspaper articles appear nationally explaining that teaching English as a requirement for graduation is racist. ACLU files class action lawsuit against state school system and his English teacher. English banned from core curriculum. He is given a diploma anyway.

Scenario: Johnny takes apart leftover firecrackers from 4th of July, puts them in a model airplane paint bottle, blows up a red ant bed.
1957 - Ants die.
2007 - BATF, Homeland Security, FBI called. Johnny charged with domestic terrorism, FBI investigates parents, siblings removed from home, computers confiscated, Johnny's Dad goes on a terror watch list and is never allowed to fly again.

Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1957 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2007 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

Bill wrote:Scenario: Johnny falls while running during recess and scrapes his knee. He is found crying by his teacher, Mary. Mary hugs him to comfort him.
1957 - In a short time, Johnny feels better and goes on playing.
2007 - Mary is accused of being a sexual predator and loses her job. She faces 3 years in State Prison. Johnny undergoes 5 years of therapy.

This last one is a little less funny when you stop to think about how many times lately Mary has ended up pregnant with little Johnny's baby.

I did not really consider them funny as much as I was sad to think the direction our country is headed

Yup.

Guess which year this story is closer to...

http://www.telegram.com/article/2008052 ... 90859/1116

Souvenir rifle shell gets 4th-grader suspended

Winchendon family shocked

By Gail Stanton CORRESPONDENT

WINCHENDON— Ten-year-old Bradley Geslak was suspended from school this week for bringing a Memorial Day souvenir to school.

The Toy Town Elementary School fourth-grader had received two empty rifle shell casings from blanks used during the town celebration held at the GAR Park Monday morning.

He brought one of the casings with him to school the next day.

“He was just playing with it at lunch,� explained Crystal Geslak, Bradley’s mother. “He wasn’t showing it to anyone; he had it in his hand and was playing with it.�

Bradley said a teacher saw him with it and told him to hand it over.

“The teacher told me to give it to her and I did,� he said.

After the piece of brass was confiscated, Ms. Geslak was called at work and told to come and pick up her son; he was being suspended for the next five days.

Her son was in tears when she got there.

“I was totally shocked. I couldn’t believe this was happening,� she said.

“Ordinarily, I try to think ahead about things, but to me, this was something good, not bad. It was just an empty shell, not even from a real bullet. A sharpened pencil would be more dangerous than this piece of metal.�

Her son had been given the two blank shells by a uniformed veteran who participated in the ceremony Monday. Bradley gave one to his grandfather and kept the other souvenir for himself.

Having received the souvenir from an adult, he never considered it wrong for him to have it, his mother said.

“He was so proud to have been given them. His dad’s a veteran, his uncle’s a veteran, both his grandfathers are veterans. Memorial Day is a big thing to us. It’s a very important holiday and we have a big celebration every year,� Ms. Geslak said.

She is now concerned about the impact that having the shell taken away will have on her son and his feelings about the holiday in the future.

According to the family, a school official said on Tuesday that the shell would not be returned to them. The family said they were also told that the next step might involve assigning a probation officer to Bradley.

They also said they don’t know the whole story yet.

“When I went to pick him up, I was told that the teacher hadn’t finished writing up her report on what took place and that I would get that later,� Ms. Geslak said. “I would have thought that when deciding to suspend my son that they would have had a complete report ready for me.�

School officials refused to comment on the incident yesterday, citing privacy regulations.

“I cannot give any comment on school suspensions,� Principal Deborah Peterson said. “I cannot confirm or deny a suspension took place, and I cannot speak about anything involving a minor. It’s all confidential, just like at a doctor’s office.�

Attempts to reach Superintendent Brooke Clenchy and School Committee Chairman Michael Niles for comment were unsuccessful.

“I am worried about what having a weapon-related suspension on his school record will mean to his future,� his mother said.

“He’s like any other 10-year-old kid. Sometimes he can have a bad attitude,� she said. “We dealt with that once earlier this year and I don’t want them to now think he is a bad kid or label him as one.

“If he had been suspended for having a bad attitude, I could have understood it. I would have supported them in that. But not for this. He didn’t even know he did anything wrong,� she said.

Ms. Geslak will have plenty of time to think about that in the coming days, because the suspension also means that she has had to give up hours at work to be with her son.

I graduated High School in 1971, so I can relate to all the 1957 type comparisons. There wasn't a day of school after I started driving in 1969 that I was without a .410 shotgun, a .22 rifle, and during bow season a recurve bow in my '57 Chevy coupe, or '67 Chevy pickup. It wasn't until my senior year that the school administration asked those of us that hunted and fished to keep our "sporting goods" covered and out of sight. But, I carried a pocket knife to school from 1st grade through my short college experience too.

We have become so "civilized" in the USA in the last 30 years or so that we have lost sense of what civilized society is all about!

surv

In 57 and 58 I remember putting my 30-30 in my locker to go deer hunting that afternoon with another boy and rode the school bus home with him.All the principal said was to make sure it wasn't loaded.times have sure changed and in my opinion not for the better.I feel like this country is going downhill fast.sj

My first 18 years were spent in a house that did not have locks on the doors. Now I sleep with an alarm on, a 1911 by the bed and a 12ga pump in the corner.
I was almost 30 before I started taking the keys out of my car and locking it.
Yep, things have really changed for the better!!

Also consider this:

1957: Only a few households have the new gadget called a television, with only a select few channels
2007: Each house has multiple TVs and a multitude of channels all rife with sex, drug use, and violence

1957: The integrated circuit (IC) was just a twinkle in Jack Kilby's left eye
2007: The internet allows anyone, children included, to search for anything and everything and have instant access to it. 8 year old Johnny can find out how to make a bomb using common household chemicals.

I'm not arguing that TVs, media, and the internet are to blame for all of society's ills. Those who know me would say I'd be the last person to argue that. They are what they are, and bring lots of both good and bad into the world. Like guns, TVs and computers have no emotions, no feelings, and so you really don't blame the tool. However, the world is what it is these days, and people have reacted a certain way in response to a changing environment. Some consider them overreactions.

Sure, I think some things were better back then than they are now, but the opposite could be said as well. It's pretty tempting to be nostalgic about days of old, but also don't forget:

1957: "Colored" and "Whites only" are ubiquitous signs. Lynchings are not uncommon.
2007: A multi-racial but predominantly black man is contending for the Presidency

1957: Rapes are typically blamed on the woman, for which she is shunned. Most women don't even come forth because of this fear.
2007: Rapists and child molesters are considered some of the worst scum of the earth. Prison inmates usually target rapists and child molesters out of disgust.

1957 Polio rippied through the country killing and crippling children, leaving others to live in an electric lung.
2007 What is polio ?

I'm with dukesean. Yes, a lot of things were better in 1957, but also a lot of things were worse.

[rant]
I am a man of faith, and I believe that mankind has existed in a fallen world ever since Adam and Eve's original sin. When Jesus walked the earth, women and children were chattel with little or no social standing, priests had reduced love of God to love of Religion and the Law, petty theft was punishable by crucifixion, and diseases such as leprosy were believed to be an indicator of lack of personal righteousness.

In 1957, it was a crueler world for people of color in this country. In 1957, you would have never had a black Secretary of State (Powell or Rice), a black female National Security Advisor (Rice), a black male or white female presidential candidate (Obama and Clinton). I don't mean to imply that race or gender ought to be a factor in any of these positions. In fact, it ought not to be a factor, which also means that it should not be a reason for exclusion either.

In 1957, automotive design had not yet benefited from modern technologies and cars were not as safe as they are today - and yet the propensity of humans to drive them outside their design envelope was as strong then as it is today.

In 1957, the space program was in its earliest infancy, and none of the wonderful technologies existed yet which we take for granted now. How many jobs exist today directly due to technologies that have trickled down from the space program?

IMHO, one thing that hasn't changed from 1957 to 2007, and which I believe is the reason our society is worse today than it was then, is man's propensity to distance himself from God. The parable of the Prodigal Son is close to my heart. The father hiked up his robes and danced for joy when his son returned to the family fold, and the son was blessed in many ways by returning.

Our society at large and its culture have become emblematic of the Prodigal Son. We permit ourselves today the formerly unthinkable. In 1957, if you wanted to obtain pornography, it was difficult but do-able, but it also carried a high risk of being discovered, and it had a monetary and social price. Today, you can turn on your computer in the privacy of your own home and get it for free; and unless you take the action of placing yourself into an accountability relationship with someone in order to beat the addiction, nobody will know about it. I was talking with my father one day about marijuana use when he was a teenager in the 1930s, versus when I was a teenager in the 1960s. He told me that he knew of a couple of guys in high school who smoked pot, but that they also were the same guys who stole cars and went to jail (and jail was harder time in 1957 than it was 2007). The girls that did it back then were also the girls who "had bad reputations." When I was a teenager, more than half the people I knew smoked pot, and the laws were right at the cusp of beginning to loosen. Nowadays, there tends to be little or no social stigma attached to it, but you have to ask yourself, "why are people so unhappy that they feel the need to take a chemical vacation from reality?"

That same computer which can be used for evil, can also be used for good, so the computer itself is not evil. Like a gun, it's use, and the fallout from its use, are entirely dependent upon the heart of the person sitting at the keyboard. I am unashamedly Christian, and I personally believe that we were created by God with a Jesus shaped hole in our hearts, and Jesus is the only thing that will fill that hole. Men and women can spend their lives trying to find things that will fill that hole - sex, drugs, money, possessions, big houses, and fancy cars - but nothing fills it the way Jesus does.

But even if you are not a Christian, it is important to believe in something that is bigger than yourself, and that provides you with some kind of Judeo/Christian moral underpinning, and to which you hold yourself accountable; because in the absence of that, you will be accountable to nothing, and all you will believe in is yourself and your own capacities; and there will be no moral restraint on your trying to define the limit of those capacities. Mankind has been that way ever since the fall.

And that, I believe, is why we wax nostalgic for the past.
[/rant]

very good!

1962 God forced by the government to not be allowed in school

You can barely mention God or wear any Christian symbols in schools (Muslims get prayer time and foot washing stations in some schools)

Isaiah 1:4 Ah, sinful nation, a people loaded with guilt, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption! They have forsaken the LORD; they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him.

NOW...ask that question again..WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO OUR SOCIETY

Ill stop it at that though

Molon_labe wrote:
NOW...ask that question again..WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO OUR SOCIETY

Ill stop it at that though

What have we allowed to happen to our country? Most of the time not even a majority votes in any election. I vote and I will bet most of our Forum menmbers vote because we have a passion. However, that is not enough. If every gun owner in the USA would get out and vote we should be able to get who we need on office.

The Annoyed Man wrote:In 1957, if you wanted to obtain pornography, it was difficult but do-able, but it also carried a high risk of being discovered, and it had a monetary and social price. Today, you can turn on your computer in the privacy of your own home and get it for free

God Bless Teh Intarwebs