The marbles and dirt memory captivated me. Perhaps something in these excerpts from an Informatify Facebook post will grab you too.
"We are often called ‘the elderly,’ but that quiet label hides a truth most people rarely pause to consider: we are the last living witnesses of a world that no longer exists…. We are the survivors of one of the most breathtaking transformations in human history – a generation that walked from the slow, deliberate rhythm of an analog world into the dazzling speed of a digital one without ever losing our sense of humanity along the way.
“Our journey began in a very different place. Many of us were born in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, when the scars of World War II were still fresh across Europe and Asia and the world was slowly learning how to hope again. Cities rose from rubble. Families rebuilt lives after years of uncertainty. Childhood unfolded in ways that would feel almost unrecognizable to younger generations today.
“Our toys were simple: marbles played in dusty yards, hopscotch drawn on cracked sidewalks, checkers and cards gathered around kitchen tables while the smell of dinner filled the house.”
“There were no smartphones, no streaming videos, no endless scroll of digital distractions. Instead, we built our memories in the real world – with scraped knees, laughter echoing down neighborhood streets, and friendships that formed face to face, without the mediation of screens.
“Music became one of the defining soundtracks of our youth. The 1960s and 1970s arrived like a wave of color and rebellion. We watched culture shift around us, carried by electric guitars and voices that dared to question the world.”
“Education looked different then, too. Our notebooks were filled with handwritten notes carefully copied from chalkboards…. Mistakes were corrected with erasers and ink, not with the click of a delete button.”
“We saw the rise of personal computers, the birth of the internet, and eventually the arrival of smartphones that placed entire libraries of knowledge in our hands.”
“We remember waiting days – or sometimes weeks – for handwritten letters to arrive in the mail. We remember rotary telephones and party lines where neighbors could accidentally overhear conversations.”
“Our bodies carry the marks of the times we lived through as well. We grew up during fears of polio and tuberculosis, illnesses that once terrified entire communities before vaccines helped bring them under control.”
“But we are not relics. We are living bridges…. We remember what life felt like before everything moved so fast.”
Crawford is an author and syndicated columnist from North Jackson.
23 comments:
This started off as a beautifu sentiment....then drifted in to hallucinatory drivel. One should be careful to build much less cross over bridges to certain things......technology itself could easily be considered the anti-Christ.
Another notable dynamic impacting the US throughout the generations, is the dissolution of the nuclear family unit. The number of two-parent households has dropped significantly (Pew Research: 67% to 23.5%). Other impacts include the decrease in the number of children per family and the increase in two-income households accompanied by external childcare and latchkey kids coming home to empty houses.
D.L. doesn't seem to understand that a President making himself and his entire family immune from paying taxes isn't something our founding Patriots would have approved even though they hated taxes, they understood it's giving the monarch the power to willfully tax citizens and use their tax money to benefit the monarchy (and the monarch's kinfolk and loyalists) and not the peace and prosperity of the citizens that's wrong.
Member berries
You know who else remembers?
Pepperidge Farm remembers
So does Werther’s Original.
I remember when 10 gallons of gasoline only cost a silver dollar and you could buy a whole pound of tobacco for two bits.
Milk and ice was delivered every day for a silver dollar a week!
And we listened to the news on Shortwave and AM on our Philco radio set that cost 20 silver dollars!
"We remember rotary telephones and party lines where neighbors could accidentally overhear conversations.”
There was never any accident about overhearing conversations.
If you wanted to make a call you had to pick up and listen to see if the line was in use. How long you listened was a moral choice you made and wasn't an accident.
We had a dirt path all the way around our house from kids constantly running around it. That path was our court for playing “holes”(dig a small hole in the dirt and from 5-10’ shoot the marble into the hole) kinda like golf with marbles. We also played “circle” (draw a 12-15” circle, place some marbles in a line in the circle, shoot your marble and try to knock one out of the circle) Everyone had a favorite marble called the “shooter”. All the kids in the neighborhood would be there playing. 5-20 kids. All ages. Play all day. Drink straight out of the outside faucet. We didn’t know it was hot. Nobody had AC!
I remember when families had fathers
10:28 is exhibiting classic TDS. No matter the topic, he sees a chance to post negatively about the president. At least TDS isn’t as bad as the Jewish Derangement Syndrome so many here have.
The diminishing number of "nuclear families" is a factor in today's loss of responsible, law-abiding kids who grow up on the traditional schedule for independent adulthood. Without saying a word, our mother would give us a withering look when my brothers and I misbehaved that immediately brought us to full attention. Lights were out and kids in bed at times appropriate for their ages. If you didn't like what Mama cooked, you were out of luck because nothing else was presented in lieu thereof. I could bang on and on about this, but everyone over 60 knows what I mean.
All designed by "programming".....with the advent of television.
Shade trees were the AC.
Because women wanted to be homemakers and not self-absorbed tyrants.
Yup. A local Pastor recently opined about what's wrong with today's youth.....and concluded that NEVER in recorded history were children of any age allowed to say, "I don't want that" or "I don't like that". Once gratitude was lost, so went respect, and earning your way in the world.
Marbles and dirt, yeah - and no bicycle helmets nor supervision until the street lights came on, cars had no seatbelts and the dashboard was made of steel. Everyone turned out stronger for it. Now "safety" has become an epidemic that if they don't "feel" safe, they're paralyzed.
Seems like you have Pattern Recognition Derangement Syndrome from the whole world experiencing "the Noticing".
Dang, you must be 120 years old. I think of myself as among the oldest visiting this blog but I can't remember doing any those type silver dollar purchases that you made. I'm further impressed that you even get online and interact at your age -- you give me hope.
Our first TV was open air. My dad would drive us to Farris TV on Northview Drive where they had a TV on in their large picture window. The TV audio was being broadcast on a local AM radio station. All shows at that time were black and white. My first memory of a TV in our little concrete block home on Newman Avenue that my dad and some friends built was small. All day long on one channel was a listing of service members who had died recently in Korea.
And thus began your programming....of internalized fear.
They literally programmed any sense of courage right out of the Boomer generation to do the right thing(s), and thus ignore the needs of a nation.
5:54 AM, FYI John Stewart is a boomer, but Jimmy Kimmel is Gen X.
The severe damage, including ignoring “the needs of a (this) nation” due to their indoctrination of easily influenced young white liberals is tremendous, and will be paid for by you younger generations, but Kimmel is akin to a KKK Grand Wizard of White Liberal Supremacy.
So, Gen X gets a lot of the blame as well.
Growing up, I never knew any single parent households. Divorce was rare and kids were constantly outside playing. After Saturday morning cartoons, the tv got turned off and we had to go play outside for a good part of the day. Parents would come to the door in the evening and yell your name to come in.
June 15, 2026 at 5:54 AM, you wouldn't have lasted one day in our time.
@9:45am Surviving what exactly? Korea WAS nasty and horrific, but still the "forgotten war", and and it didn't get in the way of a huge peace time period and the greatest economic expansion in the history of America....and you Boomers squandered it all away while spoiling your idiot children thinking you'd shield them from the discipline you thought was so harsh. Cry me a river.....the entitlement of today's youth is due to your pathetic self-absorption from being showered with more than any previous generation before, and now say, "Well I'm glad I won't be around to see it all collapse". Your generation never gave a shit about anything but yourselves, while getting divorced with nary a concern for your children, except to buy them crap.
I am huge proponent of fathers in the household.
Especially the ones that actually work hard and sustain a family so the woman does not have to assume her only other role as self-absorbed tyrant.
If more young men would act like strong alpha providers, instead of weak, aimless soy-boys who play video games and work dead end jobs, this would indeed be a better place.
And for the record, I am well aware that liberal lunatic women are just a big of a problem. If not more.
Parents have to set an example for a nuclear family. And clearly there is a generational failure that has resulted in such incompetent young men and women.
I remember trucks at the high school with gun racks in the back windows guns in them, this was the late 80’s. We had a dirt ramp at the bottom of this hill in our neighborhood, we would take turns jumping the ramp to see how far we could go. No helmet or parents to be found. Things we use to do are looked on as crazy today. Because of some of that stuff, we are strong and resilient.
Post a Comment