Kids Today Don't Know What Fun Is

WaPo has a list of “Toys to Avoid” because they’re dangerous. Some of these involved pieces that stupid children swallowed. Others, such as lawn darts, were banned because some evil children threw them at their playmates and killed or maimed them. Mostly the list makes me think that kids today are a bunch of coddled pussies.

In my day, we laughed at danger. We didn’t need lawn darts to enjoy playing with deadly projectiles. We made them from sticks and rocks and whipped them at each other at high velocities. Farm implements made excellent toys for kids with active imaginations.

Some of the best toys from my youth would probably be outlawed today. The click-clack, for example, consisted of two glass balls on either end of a thick string. You’d hold the string in the middle and make the balls smash into one another to create a really annoying clacking noise. Lots of fun. As a bonus, sometimes the glass balls would shatter and eject bits of glass into your face.

Lots of our toys involved high temperatures, something kids today are just too stupid to handle. My sister had a little oven that reached the temperature of the surface of the sun. We had a Thingmaker, too, a device for making rubber spiders and such like in molds. I also had a kit for embedding objects in epoxy to use as paperweights and what not. It involved a catalyst that made the epoxy get boiling hot.

I also had a chemistry set with real chemicals and once made cyanide gas. I had an air rifle when I was five years old and a shotgun when I was twelve. We put together model cars and planes and never once choked to death on the pieces or fried our brains inhaling the glue (we inhaled, just didn’t overdo it). We had board games with pieces that might have choked us if we had decided to eat them for some reason.

Even our school supplies were dangerous by today’s standards. I had a ruler with a razor sharp metal edge and a protractor with a stiletto blade several inches long.

Playgrounds had cement surfaces, not soft fall cushioning substances or wood chips. The monkey bars were cold steel, and we played in and on concrete pipes. There was nothing more fun than a discarded spool from the phone company. We’d curl up in the middle and roll down a hill until we crashed into something. For extra fun, there’d be nails and staples poking into your body. Abandoned refrigerators were more readily available back then as well. These made great hiding places.

Kids today don’t know what fun is.