Someone sent this to me, and overall, I have to agree...

Over 25?
All people over 25 should be dead.

To the survivors:

According to today's regulators and bureaucrats, those of us who were kids in the 40's, 50's, 60's, 70's probably shouldn't have survived.

Our baby cribs were covered with bright colored lead-based paint.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles, doors or cabinets, and when we rode our bikes, we had no helmets. (Not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.)

As children, we would ride in cars with no seat belts or air bags.

Riding in the back of a pickup truck on a warm day was always a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and not from a bottle. Horrors!

We shared one soft drink with four friends, from one bottle, and no one actually died from this.

We ate cupcakes, bread and butter, and drank soda pop with sugar in it, but we were never overweight because we were always outside playing.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day, as long as we were back when the street lights came on. No one was able to reach us all day. No cell phones. Unthinkable.

We would spend hours building our go-carts out of scraps and then rode down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes a few times, we learned to solve the problem.

We did not have Play Stations, Nintendo 64, X-Boxes, no video games at all, no 99 channels on cable, video tape movies, surround sound, personal cell phones, personal computers, or Internet chat rooms. We had friends! We went outside and found them.

We fell out of trees, got cut and broke bones and teeth, and there were no lawsuits from these accidents.

We made up games with sticks and tennis balls and ate worms, and although we were told it would happen, we did not put out very many eyes, nor did the worms live inside us forever.

We rode bikes or walked to a friend's home and knocked on the door, or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them.

Little League had tryouts and not everyone made the team. Those who didn't had to learn to deal with disappointment.

The idea of a parent bailing us out if we broke a law was unheard of. They actually sided with the law. Imagine that!

This generation has produced some of the best risk-takers and 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.

And you're one of them!

Congratulations to others who have had the luck to grow up as kids, before lawyers and government regulated our lives, for our own good.

Kind of makes you want to run through the house with scissors?

I might also add that we didn't have cartoons that gave us scripts for playing with cards and action figure merchandise--we made up our own games. We had enough imagination that we didn't need a script. I think it's interesting that even in the role-playing game I play in, none of us (and we're in our 30s and 40s) use miniatures, etc. Battle scenes, when it becomes important to know where everything, are just drawn out on scrap paper.

This may seem like an odd thing to post given my rant for smoking bans, and really, I suppose it's good that Slip-n-Slides have bumpers now and we put plastic thingies in electric outlets so kids won't stick something in them...but one does wonder if we somehow overdid it. Someone I once knew remembered fondly chewing on an electric cord when she was 2, then testing it again to see if it would do it. I suppose it was evolution in action--she survived, learnt not to do that, and probably was more diligent than most about baby-proofing when she had her own children. But it's funny, when I look back at the really fun things I did as a kid, they tended to be fairly dangerous in retrospect. I think most of us feel that way, don't you?