I'm sure that lots of things are similar, but we live in an age where even young children are sexualised to a degree. Government decrees that children of a very tender age are to be taught about sexual matters, yet laugh at the suggestion that children of any age be taught to say 'NO'. Even adverts for children's clothing show us apparel that is quite unsuitable. This is so different from the world in which I grew up in, and I cannot think, even for a minute, that it's better in any way.
Then, at the local dance, boys would line up on one side of the hall and girls on the other, each side eyeing up the other and commenting to their friends the reasons that they would or would not like to dance with a particular person, yet often doing little about it. The real reasons were simple. The boys wanted to appear 'big' in front of their mates, yet the fear of rejection held them back. For the girls, the fear of being labelled 'too forward' was never too far away, and so held them back.
Life was so different in many ways. If a girl became pregnant then a hasty marriage would be arranged to avoid the stigma of an illegitimate child being brought into the world. Nowadays, it would appear that there is more stigma attached to those who decide to wait until they are married to have children. It's a sort of volte face situation.
When I was a boy, taking drugs meant having an aspirin for a headache. By the time I was well into my teens and taking in the local dance and coffee bar scene, although I heard about drug-taking amongst pop stars I never came across anything to do with drugs myself. It was about as far away from my life as travel to the moon was.
Nowadays we hear and read much about the problems of obesity, but when I was growing up there was never enough food going spare to allow people to become obese. Not only that, but we walked to our friends' houses. If they were too far to walk then we either cycled or got on a bus. Either way, the result was that we were healthier and fitter for it. Our bedrooms were places in which we went to sleep, not, as so often nowadays, places where we lived separate lives from our parents and siblings. Meals were not plated and taken to our rooms but rather shared around the dining-table with the rest of the family.
Take a family with three children and it's not unusual for each one to have a different meal and even eat at a different time. As a boy, growing up in post-war Britain, the choice was quite clear when it came to mealtimes. You either ate what was put in front of you or went without. If you left half your meal on the plate then it would be likely to be served up for you at the next meal-time.
There were no ready meals then, at least if you discounted the one that ran around the farmyard until it was caught, butchered and cooked! Continental foods, usually referred to by our elders as 'that foreign muck', were certainly not visitors to our meal tables. Curries were, by and large, meals that were eaten in far-off India, and pasta in distant Italy. Children drank Tizer or some similar drink on the rare occasion when the adults had wine with their meals. I recall how grown-up I felt when I was allowed, aged about fourteen, to have a small glass of sweet cider with my Christmas meal.
There were, generally speaking, no thoughts about cohabiting instead of getting married. Many young people of both sexes, despite claims to the contrary, were often virgins when they married at twenty-one or twenty-two, although it seems hard to believe that now in the over-sexed climate that today's youngsters grow up in. It was not that you never wanted to find things out for yourself, more that you were too scared of the possible consequences! We had the most effective contraceptive of all handed to us constantly --- FEAR!
Getting married and looking for a new home meant finding a flat that you could afford, furnished, more often than not, by the hand-me-down furniture of relatives. Certainly, with credit so difficult to obtain, there was not too much new furniture to be had. That was something to save up for and gradually acquire, and it was all the more appreciated because of it. Actually buying a house was not even on the radar, particularly in an age where more people lived in rented property than owned their own homes. Before the wedding girls would have been saving up bed-linen and so on in their 'bottom drawer', thus ensuring that they had at least got fresh new bedlinen for their new status in life.
Even when mortgages became easier to obtain you still needed a twenty-five percent deposit in order to splash out against a new home costing £1500 to £2500, and that deposit had to be scraped together by going without other things. Often families would not be started until the young couple were finally settled into their own new home.
Of course there was no need to worry over-much about the cost of petrol because travel was usually either on a bike, bus or train. Holidays were still taken at home or else, if you could afford it, at a destination in the UK. Not for us in those days the luxury of waiting around at an airport for several hours before travelling for another two or three hours in order to sit on a crowded beach somewhere in the sun, plagued by flies, tummy-bugs or sharks trying to sell you Time-Share apartments that might not even exist, and, even if they did, you either couldn't afford them or didn't really want them.
Of course there are many things that are better nowadays, even if we don't really know how to keep them all in perspective. Computers, once the subject of science fiction films, are now found in almost every home. They can be great aids to modern living, but they also have a dark side that sucks people into traps that destroy lives. Children have too much freedom, creating a sort of anarchic existence for many of them, an existence which we see and hear the results of every time we turn on the News and hear about another teenage killing or tragedy. Many adults fear going out at night because of what is perceived to be poor policing of their streets. The streets themselves are often litter-strewn, or at least spoiled by the white blobs of discarded gum that ruin so many of our pavements.
It is claimed that we live in a Society where the rule of law has broken down, yet is the truth more that Society itself has broken down? Over the decades of my life I have witnessed a Society where general individual wealth has far exceeded the wildest dreams of many, and yet where that very excess has caused people to turn their backs on God, believing that their salvation lies either in a corrupt government or in themselves. The brokenness of the world around us will only be mended when people learn once more to respect their Creator.
Have I finally turned into a 'Grumpy Old Man'? Probably! Yet, like others of my ilk, it's just my way of expressing great sadness when I see the opportunities that are missed and the demise of a once-promising nation.
No comments:
Post a Comment