THE GOOD OLE DAYS

Does it drive you crazy when the people of my generation (make that OLD!) start talking about the “good ole days?” I don’t know if our memory gets clouded or if we just prefer to focus on the nice things that happened and tend to overlook the not-so-nice things we did and said.

Things weren’t always so good in the “ole days.” The memory that brought this to mind was a playground incident at Buckeye Elementary when I was in fifth or sixth grade. Most of the kids were teasing someone because she “had fleas!” There were other ways we were nasty to our schoolmates, calling them names like “blubber gut, bean pole, four-eyes, etc.”

Looking back from the vantage point of almost 60 years, I can see how deplorable these incidents were, how injurious they must have been to those on the receiving ends of those taunts. As parents and grandparents, let’s make a special effort to try to teach our young people the value of respecting all people. If they grow up without making these bad behaviors a part of their lives, the world might really be the “good ole days.”