Question that has bugged me forever...

Most of you know I am 83, grew up with all of the adults around me survivors of the depression. Dad had 3 brothers and 3 sisters, and in the 1940's all were self employed, butcher shops, farmers, truckers, insurance business, and a barber shop. In my generation about 20 % were self employed, but we had a couple teachers, a couple medical doctors, an aircraft engineer, and such. In my children's generation the only ones who are truly self employed are those who had a business passed down to them, and almost all of my grand children and the family members of that generation work for some one else and even those with a skill and a "good job" never can really count it from one week to the next.

I hate to admit it but most of the educators and most of the children they are teaching are not really engaged with the working world as we were and do not really expect to get ahead except by some weird chance. Winning the lottery, American Idol, or a $20 million settlement is some sort of law suit. Our hope of hard work and a little bit of luck giving us a better life than our parents, and the depression gave us a pretty low bar to over come, lead a whole generation to push the limits, electrify the nation, build a true nation wide highway system, build millions of houses, go to the moon, anything was possible. The present school children have little hope of doing well and games, dope, and leftest politics seem to have replaced a dream of the individual having a better life.

Don't know where it is going, but destroying our religious and cultural heritage and attempting to create a new culture that is further fragmented and creating an ever more alienated society would seem to me to be counter productive. A comment on black history month in New Hampshire, there were about 500 people of color here in 1860 and only about 7,200 in 1980. For what ever reason those numbers existed, the sheer lack of a presence limited their impact on our state.

The culture of small business and independents has been replaced by franchises, nation or world wide chains, the so called "gig economy, etc, and few people expect to either be self employed or to even have any real job security. Bringing in millions of immigrants from countries that have no concepts of individuals being able to better themselves is only going to make a bad situation worse. Having a political party that is willing to destroy the present order and culture and has as its goal the continued control of what ever is left would seem to limit the upside to a system in which people are willing to work hard for a fair wage and put money aside to improve their lives.

 

I grew up on a farm for the first 8 years of my life, then mom took a better paying teaching job in the big city of portland and we had to move! Dad was always away at sea, so we had Mom doing her best, most nights by the end of dinner she would be exhausted, but she would continue her "Job" of school teacher with my brothers and I for at least an hour after dinner. Our T.V. was black and white and was a whopping 13 in, and there was only 3 channels, and other then saterday morning cartoons, we watched what ever mom watched! Weekends were mostly spent at the family farm, and we got our manly training from Grand Dad and uncles and cousins, and we worked from damn near sun up till dinner time, real work! By the time I turned 14 I was into cars big time, and had saved up enough cash from both mowing lawns and news paper delivering before school, that I bought my first car ( which I still have) a 1969 Alfa Romeo GTV, and I and my buddies would spend all our free time working on it, or out driving it! I took my driver's licence test in that car, and passed with a damn near perfect score! My junior year of highschool, I bought my second car ( also still have) a wrecked 1970 Dodge Challenger R/T, ( Dad was super pissed, so was Grand Dad) and spent the next year fixing it and getting it back on the road!

We didn't have time for T.V. and rarely went to the movies, until I discovered Girls that is, I had several female friends through school, we didn't date, we were not THAT kind of friends, just normal friends, until Julia and I started hanging out more and more, it just sort of happened, and by the end of our senior year, we both knew where things were going! I enlisted and we decided to wait until I had at least finished Basic and what ever A.I.T. school I would be sent to before we got hitched, little did we know what was coming! Needless to say, We both did a bunch of growing up then, and we had our first baby a year after we got married! We never had time for any thing like T.V. or movies, and video games were still pretty basic.

Of all the "Super Heros" I had, Audi Murphy, John Wayne, And others were who I thought of as pretty cool, but I never wished I was one of them, or even like them, and later on as I became an adult, my life took on its own sort of grand adventure, and today, my super heros all wear a uniform with body armor and chevrons on their sleeves, and an M-4 strapped across their chest! They have strange tattoos that only some one in the mil. would get or understand, and they all have a certain look in their eyes! They don't have complicated lives, they love God, their Country, their Wife, and Children, and they have a very narrow set of beliefs that they would kill for and they would lay down their life for! Those are my Super Heros, the guys I went down range with, rode the back of a H-60 in the dust and jet exhaust, and did what we had to do, all so that we could hurry home off that big freedom bird and into the arms of out loved ones one more time!

 

Wait? Yall sayn superman batman Robin all those dudes are not real?
I'm calling BS

 

Yeah but I outgrew comics before my teens...

 

I still have my old Sgt Rock and Capt America, Sgt Fury, Fighting Army

 

Sgt. Rock of Easy Company!!

 

The Webley-Scot .45 automatic revolver used in the Maltese Falcon was actually .38, little known trivia.

 

http://www.mmsc.byethost7.com/downloads/Fosberry.htm?i=1

Behold, the power of the Internet!

 

My Dad bought us a Pong game back when they came out. I remember Mom being pissed because Dad was spending money that they could have used for something else. As far as i remember,, Pong was the only game we had at the house before I moved out ,, and i turned out just fine . My Grandfathers and Uncle's and great uncles were my heroes,, WW11, Korea and Vietnam vets ,, those were my heroes. I played cops and robbers ,, and cowboys and indians , with sticks for pistols and rifles. Played in the creeks ,, turning over rocks for crawdads and turtles,, fishing ,, then got old enough for a BB gun ,, then started hunting for table fare. The good old days really weren't all that good ,, but were a damned good bit better than today with these weaselly little pukes running around crying and whining about every damned little non issue of the day. I say we load up these whiny little pukes on 46's and 60's and drop them off in a little hot spot and let them negotiate some justices for their injustices. There's a whole bunch of these little twits that will probably never get any real world experiences,, but probably become a politician in a few years ,, and then they'll be dictating our lives with the parts of the world that would be just as happy to see us all ,,, Dead .

 

You might have just nailed on the head there

 

That is the entire plot of the TV show "Big Bang Theory", except that in TV land the guys actually end up with hot women and happy....except for Raj.

 

3M-TA3 mentioned "....action figures..."

Ah, Yes!

"ACTION FIGURES!"

That has to be the slickest hustle Madison Avenue ever pulled off.

It sounds so much better than "dolls for boys"--and it opened up a trillion-dollar market.

 

Hey my GI Joe having tea with Barbies set up a lot of future dates..

 

Well that explains a lot....lol

 

I remember in elementary school our G.I. Joe's would beat-up Ken and date Barbie. However, by Jr. High we were over that. I still have a couple of Joes somewhere, I need to buy some new odds-and-ends and give them to my 5 year old Nephew.

 

My Hero has been God and Jesus Christ, from the time I asked him in my life at age 7 till now.
God has always intervened in my life rescuing me from my dilemmas.
And He always will.

 

It's just the current type/archetype expression of humanity in it's most recent medium of communication.

The more important question is WHICH "super heroes" does a particular person identify with or prefer to follow. Then you will know many important things about that person.

For example, ask yourself, Spiderman and Wolverine vs. Superman and Batman.

It's more relevant than you think.

 

I was taught hero worship was weak and passed that along to my kids.

 

Inner strength from Knowledge
S