If you are 35 or older, I know you will relate:

Every generation of parents have told their kids how hard things were when they were growing up. From walking to school barefoot in the snow, uphill – both ways, to more realistic reminders of how technology has made life easier for their kids. I remember thinking when I was a kid hearing this, that I was never gonna lay this on my kids. But with the sudden advances in technology of late, I think this generation is more deserving of this tradition than any other. Really, compared to our childhood, today’s kids live a charmed life in Utopia! So, here it is. Dear kids:

When I was a kid, we didn't have computers. When we wrote something like a paper for school, we wrote it. With our hand. And a pen! Or a typewriter. We actually had to know how to spell! And when we wanted to move a sentence up or back in the paragraph, there was no cut and paste command, you re-did the whole damn page!



No Internet. If we wanted to know something, We had to go to the damn library and look it up in a book. (I’m sure you know what books were, having seen them in old movies). And there was no email!! (or I.M.) We had to actually write and snail-mail somebody a letter, with paper, pen, envelope, stamp, and time! You had to walk down the street, put it in the mailbox, wait days for it get there, days for someone to write back, and more days in the mail back to you!

Kids had to actually respect and listen to adults. Child Protective Services didn't care if our parents beat us. As a matter of fact, the parents of all our friends also had permission to kick our ass! No where was safe!

There was no digital music. If 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'd would always talk over the beginning. And you were fine with it, cause it was the only way to get free music ever! No iPods either. When we walked down the street, we listened to the traffic! There were no CD players! We had tape decks in our cars. We'd play our favorite tape a few times, and if didn’t get “eaten” and jammed up in the player, it would “wear out” and sound worse and worse the more you played it. So your favorite stuff sounded the worse! How would like them apples?

No cell phones! Pagers were expensive, only for doctors and drug dealers, and all they could display was a phone number. If you were gonna meet someone somewhere, you had to actually do it! There was no calling to arrange a new plan. Phones were at home, business, or sometimes they would have “public” ones on street corners that you put a quarter in for five minutes, and everyone around could listen in! 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 no Caller ID 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 video games with high-resolution graphics, we had the Atari 2600! With our games 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 faster and faster and harder and harder until you died! Just like LIFE!


You had to use a little book called a TV Guide to find out what was
on the few channels there were. 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 if you tried to stay there to keep flipping, your Mom yelled “get back away from the radiation!” Oh, and no Cartoon Network either. You could only get cartoons on Saturday Morning. And no VCR’s! ‘You slept in Saturday, you missed them for another week. Do you hear what I'm saying!?!


Movies were something that you see in a movie theater. Period. If you didn’t see a particular movie before it stopped showing. That’s it! We thought we would never see it. Ever.

Digital cameras? No, …cameras used film. Film was something you had to buy, for five bucks, each time you wanted to take 20 more photos. Then,… when you took the picture, you couldn’t see it right after, to see if it was good!?! You had wait till all 20 picts are taken, take the roll in for developing (another five bucks), then you’d get back 20 little shiney prints that you couldn’t touch ‘cus they’d easily get finger prints, and to “share” a photo meant you’d giveaway yours, and plan to make another for yourself from the negative but you never did ‘cus it was too much of a pain in the ass!! ‘That was photo sharing.


Facebook? Nothing even similar. If you wanted friends, you had go out and work hard at making them ... Imagine that!
That's exactly what I'm talking about! You kids have absolutely no idea how easy you have it. “Spoiled” is an extreme understatement. You guys wouldn't last five minutes, if you were back just a few decades! You’d better thank your lucky stars every day of your life that you didn’t grow up a few decades ago. And when you become parents, I don’t think there’s anything left for your kids to have easier than you’ve had, so don’t worry about that. Just be nicer and feel pity for your parents, and go get them a pillow or something.

I just bought 60% of GM!

Well, I guess I’m doing pretty well. I just bought 60% of GM the other day!

Robert Reich had, (as usual) some very cool insights on this, including:

“The only practical purpose I can imagine for the bail-out is to slow the decline of GM to create enough time for its workers, suppliers, dealers and communities to adjust to its eventual demise.”

Robert Reich was the nation's 22nd Secretary of Labor and is a professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and his blog of easy-to-read explanations of complicated stuff is at: http://robertreich.blogspot.com/

Michael Moore has (as usual) some wonderfully radical observations, and some specific suggestions of what we should do with our newly-purchased car company. Please read his ideas on his link below, and see if you agree, because you and I have to make some big, executive decisions very soon!


“It is with sad irony that the company which invented "planned obsolescence" -- the decision to build cars that would fall apart after a few years so that the customer would then have to buy a new one -- has now made itself obsolete.” The complete, very interesting summary is at: http://www.michaelmoore.com/


Well, Mr. Moore is again, dead-on with simple, logical, down-to-earth assessments of what we as a country, and as a society, are doing wrong and what we should be doing to make it better. Because he does this publicly, he is branded a “radical”, a revolutionist, a treasonist, a seditionist and worse. When really he is one of our nations greatest Patriots. And bravest. He lives with constant death threats from ignorant redneck types who don’t realize he works hard at doing what he feels is the best way he can help his country. By simply making entertaining documentary films that make us think about the status quo. We need to always remember that, just because things are, and have been a certain way, and just because a gigantic system of millions of people making their livelihood from it, doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be abolished. If this was so, we would still have slavery in America. We would still have an open and active Opium trade. And we would still have a huge tobacco industry…- oh, well, some things we’re still working on.

Mr. Moore has the guts to say what millions of us are too afraid to say about many topics. I’ve seen all of his films and after every one I sit there and say to myself “You miserable, lazy, selfish, scared loser!” “Why don’t you have the nerve to speak up like Michael does, and try to do what you know is best for your country!?” I have personally studied the electric car’s development enough over the last few decades to know, absolutely, without a doubt, that it is the number one solution to many of our transportation, economic, ecological, and foreign political problems. And that right now is the time to totally embrace the technology 100%, with every effort of every auto industry worker and every government bureaucrat, to completely re-make our energy infrastructure over the next several decades. Apparently Mr. Moore does too. Now if we can just convince all those auto guys and bureaucrats, which make their living off of the internal combustion engine, then it will be an easy transition!

Seriously, now that we’re all auto industry tycoons, how ‘bout we just make electric cars, since they don’t use petroleum, they don’t spew out noise and pollution, they go 150 miles on a charge, and the national driving daily average is just 29, and they have 300 less moving parts than an internal combustion engine, so they don’t break down anywhere nearly as often.

With our resources of our huge car company, we could take the car world by storm by being the first on the market with affordable electrics. And we could start, by easily selling them to all of the millions of two car families. That way, they’d still have one car on the old system for long summer vacations or whatever. Then over time, we could create a network of charging stations near restaurants, or interchangeable batteries, and then people could use their electric more and more. We could sell people solar panel covered carports so that their car charges for free (and green) all day while they park in the shade. We’d have it made in the shade!
Let’s start by changing the name though, don’t you think? I mean, General Motors is a stupid name for a car company, and it has a LOT of bad connotations associated with it. How ‘bout “Only Electric Motors” (OEM!). Or, how ‘bout “No more stupid, noisy, smelly, planet-killing, war-causing, internal-combustion-engines car company”. It has a nice ring to it, don’t you think? Lemme know what you think, partner.