Always At the Center
A friend gave me one of those email forwards that has been around for a while now. This is the oldie but goodie: Kids Born in the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, & 70s. You know some of the lines in it, no doubt:

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.
Riding in the back of a pick up on a warm day was always a special treat.
We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle.
We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle and NO ONE actually died from this….

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers, problem-solvers and inventors ever! The past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.
We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned
HOW TO DEAL WITH IT ALL!

You might want to share this with others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before the lawyers and the government regulated our lives for our own good.

While there’s some truth in it, I would guess that underneath it are ignored statistics and many illnesses that we don’t have anymore. I would make a guess that part of what has happened is a much less healthy environment over all due to so many more people. Did you know that in 1950 there were only 150 million people in the United States? Later this year, a mere 56 years later, the era covered by the email, there will be DOUBLE that, 300 million.

Add to that the communications explosion, which allows us to track and know about far more things more quickly. That means we know about the problems that arise and how many people actually do die from some of the things that we, the survivors, didn’t die from.

Infant mortality rate in the same period dropped from around 20-25/1000 to 7/1000.
And maternal mortality rate dropped by 99%.

It’s easy to look at the survivors and say we made it. But thanks to all the advances that have been made and all the things we supposedly can’t do anymore, there are a lot more survivors then there used to be.

But above it all, I just love the way we Baby Boomers - most of the people in the age group covered by the list - put ourselves in the center of the universe. But, hey, why change now.

PS: I know that the original was probably tongue-in-cheek and a parody, etc. But the truth underlying some of these is always interesting. Anyway, we survived without the Internet and Blogs as well. Only God knows how.