20 Reasons Why I was Deprived as a Child
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1. Lucky Charms only had four kinds of marshmallow. When they came out with a fifth “new blue diamonds”, we thought we had died and gone to heaven.
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2. To get to your own money, you had to line up at a bank. You had to keep a bankbook which the teller would update in PEN.
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3. Batteries were shitty. They ran out of power very quickly, and they would leak acid.
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4. There was no such thing as Asiago or Chipolte or salsa or any of that fancy-schmancy food.
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5. Nobody ate Nachos or chicken wings. I don’t think they even existed in restaurants.
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6. Cartoons were only on for 6 hours a week, and only on Saturday mornings.
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7. You couldn’t record a TV show. If you missed it, you missed it. Months or years might go by before you’d see it again.
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8. Roller Coasters were made of wood, and only went up and down. There were no loop-de-loops.
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9. The early video games were so shitty, you could see the individual pixels on the flying asteroids and you space ship.
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10. Phones had 5-foot cords and most houses only had one.
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11. There was only one Rocky Movie.
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12. When riding in a car, I wasn’t strapped down in a kids seat. I coulda gotten KILLED.
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13. People told inappropriate politically-incorrect jokes and nobody got sent on sensitivity training.
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14. Nobody knew what yoga or tai-chi or tae-bo was.
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15. McDonald’s Big Macs were served in Styrofoam containers, which were killing the planet and making polar bears DIE.
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16. They never gave us graduation parties for finishing kindergarten.
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17. Lego was mostly just red and white and black blocks. You were lucky if you had a few wheels to make a block-car.
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18. If you misbehaved at school, you got the strap. I never did..but just the threat of it traumatized me for life.
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19. The only fruit you had in the grocery store was apples, oranges and bananas. You might get grapes or cherries for a few weeks a year, when they were in season.
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20. The closest thing we had to an I-phone was Etch-a-Sketch
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October 18, 2012 at 10:58 pm
I loved my Etch-a-Sketch. The church had a strawberry social. June was the only time you got strawberries. Kiwis were WAY to exotic for most people to eat. Yogurt was a new food. We got cupcakes the last day of kindergarten and we were allowed to have peanut butter at school. We were thrilled when we got a box of yellow, blue and clear Legos. Mrs. Parks pulled kids to the office by their ear.
October 18, 2012 at 11:23 pm
If you wanted to know the answer to something, you had to leave the house (leave the house!) and go to the library – or ask your Dad (who told you to go to the library).
October 19, 2012 at 1:43 am
Hah!. You were privileged. I can, just barely, remember the family’s first TV — It only worked in the evening and there was only 1 station, so, of course, there were no video games or Saturday morning cartoons. Some weekends we went to the to my grandparent’s cabin — it had running water for the kitchen sink, but there wasn’t a bathroom. When my wife was about 8, her parents bought a place in the country in Wisconsin — party line crank phone, outhouse instead of a bathroom, no running water in the house, one-room schoolhouse for the first couple of years they lived there.
Never hear of Legos until I was too old for them, but did have Lincoln Logs. Didn’t have to worry about a strap if I misbehaved in school — got popped with a paddle once when I was in the 5th or 6th grade in Nebraska and then again in Texas the year before I graduated from high school. I sure didn’t want to tell my parents or I would have gotten in trouble with them over getting in trouble in school.
People told inappropriate politically-incorrect jokes — and some of them really believed the nastiness behind the jokes. I remember being told about how THOSE people lived.
October 20, 2012 at 2:26 pm
Ah..those were the days….kids today dont know the meaning of TRUE deprivation!!
October 21, 2012 at 10:46 am
@Army Wife. Yeah…I forgot peanut butter at lunch. If you brought in a PBJ today, they’d send you on sensitivity training and hold a candle-light vigil outside your house.
@Anna Oh…yeahhh…those things called “BOOKS”. That were edited and fact-checked, before they were published. And could be used as credible sources of informatin.
@Mike We had a crappy black and white TV that only got three stations (one French) and occasionally (if the reception was clear) we would get ONE American station. When I was ten, we got a color TV and a TV antenna, and suddenly we got all the American stations (three networks and PBS) and I thought we had died and gone to heaven.
My uncle had an old farmhouse which he used as a summer retreat. It dated to the early 1900′s. Like your grandparent’s cabin, it had one hand-pump in the kitchen for water and the toilet was the outhouse outside. He did have electricity, though, with his generator.
@Linda
Today’s kids, I tell ya. Don’t know how GOOD they have it (Grumble Grumble Grumble).
November 15, 2012 at 9:10 am
We got two tv stations – ABC and PBS. On Sat. night at either 7pm or 8pm the choice was between Hee Haw and Lawrence Welk – I think this is a big part of the reason than I now read so much
November 15, 2012 at 10:16 am
@Kim I remember Lawrence Welk. We reluctantly watched him because we knew “Emergency” would be on next.
November 18, 2012 at 1:40 pm
I remember when I saw PBS for the first time…I was about 8. Mr. Rogers and the Electric Company. Oh my!