thedrifter
12-10-08, 08:57 AM
The good old days weren't necessarily good
Forum Publishing Group
December 9, 2008
Recently, I read people are buying simpler, old-fashioned toys for their children this year, such as Cabbage Patch dolls. But the original adoption of Cabbage Patch Kids took place in the early '80s. You call that old-fashioned? I have underwear older than that.
Slightly crazed Black Friday shoppers recently bombarded their way into a Wal-Mart store and an employee behind the doors was killed. There was another story of someone being trampled to death, again by crowds "dying" for that 50 percent mark-down.
Were we always this loony? Yes.
Cabbage Patch dolls hit the stores in 1983 and during the first six months on the market more than two million were "adopted." People stood in lines for hours waiting for the store to open.
And then — pandemonium! Customers, women mostly, screamed and clawed their way to the displays and when two or more wanted the same doll it was war! Ah yes — the good old non-violent days.
Many of us have a tendency to remember then as better than now. But an in-depth look changes that.
In 1983, President Reagan described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire;" the United States Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon was demolished by a car bomb containing 300 pounds of TNT; the United States Marines' headquarters building in Beirut was attacked by a TNT-laden truck and the explosion killed more than 200 sleeping Marines; the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that by September 1983 they had caught more than one million illegal aliens trying to slip into the United States, the vast majority being Hispanic and fleeing the poverty of Mexico.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And how about the lunacy of not allowing gays to adopt in Florida?
In 1983, representatives from around the nation kicked off National Gay and Lesbian Pride Week. Still on the periphery of American society in many ways, gays not being allowed adoption rights makes my beloved state of Florida seem like an ignorant, backwoods hole on the map. Florida, it seems, would prefer to shuffle children from foster home to foster home rather than acknowledge that gay men and women can provide stable and loving homes. What kind of idiocy is allowing years in a gay foster home but disallowing permanent adoption? And what about gays who were once married to the opposite sex, had children and then chose to follow their biological lifestyle? Does the court decree that those parents are no longer fit parents? No.
Get in the 21st century Florida and stop denying equal rights based on outmoded, unfair thinking. It's time you took gay people from the back of the bus.
My father used to sing a tune about everything old is new again. But in some ways, everything old is still the same. I think I'll go hug a Cabbage Patch doll.
Hilde Messmer is a longtime Broward County resident. E-mail her at berhil@aol.com.
Ellie
Forum Publishing Group
December 9, 2008
Recently, I read people are buying simpler, old-fashioned toys for their children this year, such as Cabbage Patch dolls. But the original adoption of Cabbage Patch Kids took place in the early '80s. You call that old-fashioned? I have underwear older than that.
Slightly crazed Black Friday shoppers recently bombarded their way into a Wal-Mart store and an employee behind the doors was killed. There was another story of someone being trampled to death, again by crowds "dying" for that 50 percent mark-down.
Were we always this loony? Yes.
Cabbage Patch dolls hit the stores in 1983 and during the first six months on the market more than two million were "adopted." People stood in lines for hours waiting for the store to open.
And then — pandemonium! Customers, women mostly, screamed and clawed their way to the displays and when two or more wanted the same doll it was war! Ah yes — the good old non-violent days.
Many of us have a tendency to remember then as better than now. But an in-depth look changes that.
In 1983, President Reagan described the Soviet Union as an "evil empire;" the United States Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon was demolished by a car bomb containing 300 pounds of TNT; the United States Marines' headquarters building in Beirut was attacked by a TNT-laden truck and the explosion killed more than 200 sleeping Marines; the Immigration and Naturalization Service announced that by September 1983 they had caught more than one million illegal aliens trying to slip into the United States, the vast majority being Hispanic and fleeing the poverty of Mexico.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
And how about the lunacy of not allowing gays to adopt in Florida?
In 1983, representatives from around the nation kicked off National Gay and Lesbian Pride Week. Still on the periphery of American society in many ways, gays not being allowed adoption rights makes my beloved state of Florida seem like an ignorant, backwoods hole on the map. Florida, it seems, would prefer to shuffle children from foster home to foster home rather than acknowledge that gay men and women can provide stable and loving homes. What kind of idiocy is allowing years in a gay foster home but disallowing permanent adoption? And what about gays who were once married to the opposite sex, had children and then chose to follow their biological lifestyle? Does the court decree that those parents are no longer fit parents? No.
Get in the 21st century Florida and stop denying equal rights based on outmoded, unfair thinking. It's time you took gay people from the back of the bus.
My father used to sing a tune about everything old is new again. But in some ways, everything old is still the same. I think I'll go hug a Cabbage Patch doll.
Hilde Messmer is a longtime Broward County resident. E-mail her at berhil@aol.com.
Ellie