I got this in my E-mail the other day, and thought it was so good, I had to elaborate on it some!

The original E-mail is as follows:
When I was a kid, adults used to bore me to tears with their tedious diatribes about how hard things were when they were growing up; what with walking twenty-five miles to school every morning ... uphill BOTH ways... through year 'round blizzards...carrying their younger siblings on their backs... to their one-room schoolhouse... where they maintained a straight-A average, despite their full-time, after-school job at the local textile mill... where they worked for 35 cents an hour just to help keep their family from starving to death!

I remember promising myself that when I grew up, there was no way in Hell I was going to lay a bunch of crap like that on kids about how hard I had it and how easy they've got it!

But now that I'm well past the age of today's kids & teens, I can't help butlook around and notice the youth of today! You've got it so easy! I mean, compared to my childhood, you live in a damn Utopia! And I hate to say it but you kids today don't know how good you've got it! I mean, when I was a kid we didn't have the Internet! Forget broadband...we didn't even have DIAL-UP! If we wanted to know something, we had to go to the damn library and look it up ourselves in the card catalog! There was no email! We had to actually write somebody a letter with a pen!? Then you had to walk all the way across the street and put it in the mailbox and it would take like a week to get there! There were no MP3's or Napsters! You wanted to steal music, you had to hitchhike to the damn record store and shoplift it yourself! Or you had to wait around all day to tape it off the radio and the DJ's usually talked over the beginning and @#*% it all up!

And talk about hardship... you couldn't just download porn! You had to steal it from your brother or bribe some homeless dude to buy you a copy of "Hustler" at the 7-11! Those were your options! We didn't have fancy crap like "Call Waiting"! If you were on the phone and somebody else called they got a busy signal, that's it! And we didn't have fancy Caller ID Boxes either! When the phone rang, you had no idea who it was! It could be your school, your mom, your boss, your bookie, your drug dealer, a collections agent....you just didn't know! You had to pick it up and take your chances, mister!

We didn't have any fancy Sony Playstation video games with high resolution 3-D graphics! We had the Atari 2600! With games like "Space Invaders" and "Asteroids" and the graphics sucked ass! Your guy was a little square! You actually had to use your imagination! And there were no multiple levels or screens....it was just one screen forever! And you could never win. The game just kept getting harder and harder and faster and faster until you died!

Just like LIFE!

When you went to the movie theater there was no such thing as stadium seating! All the seats were the same height! If a tall guy or some old broad with a hat sat in front of you and you couldn't see, you were just screwed!

Sure, we had cable television, but back then that was only like 15 channels and there was no on-screen menu and no remote control! You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was on! You were screwed when it came to channel surfing! You had to get off your ass and walk over to the TV to change the channel and there was no Cartoon Network either! You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. Do you hear what I'm saying? We had to wait all week for cartoons, you spoiled little bastards!

And we didn't have microwaves! if we wanted to heat something up... we had to use the stove or go build a friggin' fire... imagine that! If we wanted popcorn, we had to use that stupid JiffyPop thing and shake it over the stove forever like an idiot.

That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids today have got it too easy. You're spoiled. You guys wouldn't have lasted five minutes back in 1980!

***THE END***

I really did love this article, since I could relate to so much of it!  It blows my mind to think that sheesh.....less than 15 years ago, we had NO internet.  The early 90's saw AOL, CompuServe, and Prodigy in their INFANCY!  Truly amazing how far we've come in such a short amount of time.  Now the only question is this.  If we're so advanced, how come it's taking so incredibly long to get back to the moon!  We went there in 1969 for goodness sake, and our computers now have thousands of times more power than they did on rockets back then.  You know what it is?  Our world has gotten a lot more screwed up now than it was back then.

Perhaps it WAS safer back in the simpler days of the eighties after all!