Our childhoods. I say this to older people. People over fifty. People born before 1970.
Perhaps it was the 1980s when things really started to shift, as far a kids go. I think that is when they started giving out trophies to kids just for playing the game. For participating.
Nope, I say to that. Trophies should be for the winners. The kids who actually worked harder and scored more points. Or perhaps they were just more talented by their birthright or had luck on their side that day. Either way, they scored more points, and they deserve the trophy. That is how it works in the real world.
When we started giving trophies to the kids on the losing team, too, we obscured their sense of reality. They started believing that they can get the gold ring for nothing at all. They don’t even have to try. And then it happens. “Entitlement” sinks in.
There’s a lot more I could say about the demise of society. And maybe I’m wrong. Maybe everybody should get the grand prize.
Not only that, when I was a kid, I was told to behave — OR ELSE.
Yes. A sense of fear was instilled in me from an early age. Religion helped with this. Be good, or go straight to hell. Do not pass GO. Do not collect $200.
Heck. Even our fairy tales scared the living daylights out of us. These days, kids’ stories are all fluffy and encompassing. But when I was growing up, we had Hansel and Gretel. I mean, let’s break it down, really.
The story had a psychopathic cannibal, the likes of Hannibal Lecter. It featured the horrible villain, a seemingly kindly old woman who lives in the woods in an edible gingerbread and candy house. But she uses that yummy, appealing house to ensnare children so that she can kill, cook, and eat them. Pass the salt.
In the Brothers Grimm 1812 version, the old woman decides that Hansel would be the more succulent child. So what does she do? She locks him up in a cage to fatten him while starving his sister Gretel. For whatever reason, though, the old woman / witch decides to eat them both anyway. But leave it to smarty Gretel. Girl Power. She takes advantage of an opportune moment and pushes the witch into the oven and burns her to death.
The End. (The book closes. A kiss on my forehead, and…) “Nighty, night, Polly. Sweet dreams.” (Click. The bedroom goes dark.)
Yeah. We were scared, alright.
Even the mainstream fairy tales had a dark side. Like the 1950 Disney film “Cinderella.”
We all know it. The movie depicts a beautiful young woman who’s been virtually enslaved by her evil stepmother. Mopping. Cleaning out the fireplace. And on. But. She gets a chance at happiness when her fairy godmother intervenes. The godmother transforms Cinderella. Her rags turn into a gown, and she’s off to attend a royal ball and meet Prince Charming. Blah, blah. We know the rest.
Midnight tolls. She runs out of her glass slipper. Prince finds it. He checks all the feet in the land. Cinderella’s two evil stepsisters try on the slipper, but their feet are too fatty. The shoe fits Cinderella, and she marries the handsome prince. TA-DA. The movie.
However. There is a different story in the 1812 Grimm version, called “Aschenputtel. “Basically, it is pretty horrific. The evil stepmother hands a knife to the eldest of her two daughters and orders her to cut her toe off, “for when you are queen, you will never have to go on foot.”
The prince is fooled and rides off with her. But then. Wait. Two talking pigeons alert him to her blood-soaked shoe. The younger stepdaughter then tries to fool him by cutting off her heel, but the pigeons tip off the prince again.
Ultimately, he identifies the girl of his dreams. But those two evil stepsisters won’t give it up. They attend the wedding hoping to gain favor. But the pigeons blind them by plucking out their eyes. Blind and lame stepsisters.
Yeah, when we were kids, things were different. The truth came hard. We had to work for the money. We had to win the game to get the trophy. We had to wait for things, like a trip to the library, if we wanted to know what a platypus might eat for dinner (insect larvae, by the way).
Were they the good old days? Or just the old days? Did all of those hard knocks build character? Or neurosis?
Maybe the answer is different for all of us. All I know is that when the white bread got a little moldy, we cut off the corner. Same for the hard cheese.
Yep. Hard cheese, baby.
Hard cheese.
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“Character is formed in the stormy billows of the world.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
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“Our ability to handle life’s challenges is a measure of our strength of character.”
– Les Brown
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“We continue to shape our personality all our life.”
– Albert Camus
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Scared, were we? Heck yeah, we were scared.
