Freedom is just an illusion today.
When I was a young kid back in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, the town was about 100,000 vrs the one million metro area today.
I lived one block from the large LSU lake and knew every single cove in it. The shoreline is long due to the many curves and you could be in some parts of the lake and not see other parts.
I had a Remington bolt action 22 rifle with a magazine that held about 18 bullets of short rifle shells or about 12 of long rifle shells. I normally used short rifle shells as they only cost 35 cents for a box of 50 and the long rifle shells were about 75 cents.Actually there were three 22 shells---shorts, longs and long rifles.
I would put the rifle crossways on my bicycle handlebars and pedal through the neighborhood until I reached the spillway of the lake which was about a mile and a half away. Going into the swamps below the spill way I would proceed to shoot anything that moved except human beings. Now mind you, I'm inside the city limits and not far from subdivisions.
Now imagine if you can, a 12 yr. going to the hardware store and trying to buy bullets. Imagine if you can a 12 yr. old casually pedaling his bike with a rifle on the crossbars going down through a city subdivision.
Today if this happened, there would be five police squad cars filled with militarized hostile cops and a SWAT team would descend with sirens screaming.
The owner of the hardware store where I bought the bullets would be arrested and tried for sale to a minor. My parents would be arrested and tried for
letting me do this and would in all likelihood end up incarcerated and I would be put in a foster home after undergoing psychiatric examination.
Times change.
I, and the rest of the kids, would always have our pocket knives on us. I wouldn't leave home without it. During recess at school, we would play mumbly peg. For those that don't know the game, it's where two people would stand facing each other about five feet apart. We would throw our knives down at our feet to stick in the ground to see who could get the closest to our feet. Each got five throws and the closest would win.
Today, if a kid brought a knife to school, the riot squad would be called out and the kid would be expelled from school and the consequence for his parents would be the same as the rifle incident.
I had a five horsepower Royal outboard motor by the time I was 12. Ran all over the lake with it completely unsupervised by parental restraint. Hell, the majority of the time they didn't even know where I was. Personal Flotation Devices???? Hell, we didn't even know what they were. We were our own PFDs. We could swim and we never took swimming lessons. We just learned on our own in the lake or the river. Today, the laws require a PFD on a kid under 18 and there has to be PFDs equal to the number of people on a boat and the Coast Guard is pushing to require them to be on all adults.
We would freely jump from the boat and swim and we did this even at night sometimes. Imagine that! We would go to the Amite river bridge and jump from it. It was a 50 foot fall into the water. We learned to point our feet and be absolutely vertical with arms tight to our sides at point of impact to lessen the hard entrance into the water. No one even thought about it. It was just kids naturally having fun. It's against the law now to
jump from a bridge.
We were in our glory being young and free and unfettered in our play.
We used a cane pole to catch catfish and bream. We didn't need any fishing license nor any parent to show us how. Parents were busy working and not worrying about and overseeing their little Johnnys like they do today. We were free.
I had a Doodlebug motor scooter in the 6th grade. It didn't have lights on it and the brakes were broken. I stopped by hitting the kill switch and dragging my feet on the road. Wore out a lot shoes doing this. I rode all over Baton Rouge in daylight and dark. There was no law requiring a license plate nor an operator's license nor lights. My parents didn't worry about it at all. People were different then.
Today, the kids are force fed Ritalin or Prozac to calm them down into being little zombies. Who wants to be around active kids right? You never heard about some kid taking a rifle to school and blowing away classmates back then. Back then , we supervised ourselves. We were good ol' southern boys that knew how to handle a gun responsibly and to hunt and fish without some adult hovering over us.
Schools did not have metal detectors or fences around them. There were no anger management classes. When a schoolmate was killed in an auto accident there were no group trauma therapy or counseling. That was just part of life and we accepted it and moved on without
mulling over it.
Responsibilities was not saddled on someone else. We matured faster.
We never heard of anorexia or bulimia. If you were skinny you were skinny and if you were chubby you were chubby and no one gave a damn about it. We had school fights. Yes, punches were thrown and wrestling was engaged in. No one would think of picking up
a tire iron, rock or knife or gun or kick you when you were down. We had ethics. We were responsible kids because we were free to develop that way.
My Dad gave me a chrome plated 32 caliber revolver with a holster when I was 14. I would strap it on when I went hunting with my shotgun for squirrels, rabbits and doves. Thought nothing of it. Anybody could carry a gun back then. Nobody gave it a second thought.
We were not strung out on crystal meth or pot. We didn't even know what that was. We would drink quart bottles of Busch Bavarian beer while driving our cars at age 14. We acquired driver's licenses at age 14 back then. If you could belly up to a bar, you could get a drink.
We were treated as adults at a early age and I suspect that is why we were so mature.
Our heads were screwed on correctly. We were allowed to develop naturally and we had freedom.
Now, I suppose this article will piss of a bunch of therapists, psychologists, school counselors, fruit juice drinkers and the parents
who wouldn't let their precious go out without being lathered with sun block. So be it.
Freedom is just an illusion today. We had real freedom back then.
Bob White
August 16, 2010
No comments:
Post a Comment