Before Seat Belts and Car Seats

You know that you are getting old when you wake up one day and you are living in a very foreign country. Things are just not like they used to be. This has the potential to be an extremely long post. I will try to keep it short.

Are the changes that have taken place in the last 50 some years for the better or the worse? Some are definitely better but most, in my opinion, are for the worse. For instance, Banquet Pot Pies used to be full of tender white chicken or turkey breast meat and large chunks of good quality vegetables. They were delicious.

The last time that I had a Banquet Pot Pie it was full of some type of dark meat that was hard to identify with microscopic vegetables that looked like they were the castaways from someone's poorly performing garden. But most importantly the taste was terrible.

Many foods have changed for the worse. Potato chips bags used to be full of potato chips instead of air. T.V. Dinners tasted good and were cheap too. Pepsi doesn't taste the same now at all. My Son recently bought some cans of Pepsi that were made with real sugar in "re-makes" of the original cans and it tasted so good.

I told my oldest Son the other night that he didn't have a car seat or even a seat belt when he was young. When he was a newborn until he was 2 or 3 years old, he sat on my lap in the car. If he and I went somewhere alone he was on his own because we didn't have seat belts in all cars and trucks and even if they did have belts, you didn't strap your little kids in them, they weren't made for kids.

With our second Son, we did have a car seat of sorts. But it was probably more dangerous than no car seat at all. It was a hard plastic booster type seat with a hard plastic shield that came down in front of him. It didn't work with seat belts, so if we had ever been in an accident he would probably have broken his nose hitting that shield.

Station wagons used to be popular for families with children because the kids could entertain themselves by crawling over the seat into the back to play games or take naps on long trips.

When I was young and you went anywhere in a truck, it was a given that the kids had to ride in the back if it was warm weather. That's just where the kids all rode. We were still riding in the backs of pickup trucks when my kids were young.

I have blogged before about how we hauled horses when I was young and even when we were first married. Our horses just jumped into the back of the pickup with a wobbly, wooden rack with their heads over the roof of the cab facing the wind.

We weren't the only ones who hauled their horses like this, that's the way everyone did it. Now you have to have padded trailers, bumper pads, blankets and leg wraps. You also have to go to seminars, read books and work with your horse for hours or hire a trainer to teach it how to step up 4 inches to get into that trailer.

I honestly do not remember having problems loading horses into the back of pickups. I don't remember spending hours training them and we certainly didn't have to read a book or go to some big name expert's training clinic to figure out how to load a horse.

Our horses just jumped in when asked because they were livestock and not pets. They respected us and trusted us. If we asked them to do something they did it because we were confident that they could and would do it. We have dumbed down our horses today, we no longer give them credit for intelligence and ability. Our horses of yesterday didn't get a lot of mixed signals from their owners like horses do now.

I recently read in our local paper that they are thinking about making cold medicine by prescription only because of the Meth problem that is getting so out of control. That is such a shame for the people who are stricken with a nasty cold on a weekend or during the night and who can't afford to run to the Doctor every time they get a sniffle.

This all makes me wonder when we will have to start signing a paper or getting a prescription to buy drain cleaner. It has already caused farmers grief and heartache by having to account for their chemicals and the worry of keeping everything locked up tight.

We can no longer give privileges to the majority of the people, we have to punish the majority for the abuses of the minority.