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Were the good old days really that good?

Sometimes we hear wistful tales of a bygone era when life was simpler and people felt safer. Kids could go out and run around the neighborhood. Parents didn't worry about child trafficking or online sextortion or whether their kids would make it through the school day without being shot.

But was life really safer back then? The elders are often the ones who romanticize the olden days, but according to Gen Xers and boomers who were asked, the good old days may not have been as rosy as those rose-colored glasses make them appear.

Someone asked the AskOldPeople channel on Reddit, "Hey elders! I often talk to my grandmother and she states that the world was better back then — she could send her kids out to play for hours with no worries about them. I’m wondering: was life really safer back then?"

Of course, there are always a few people who reminisce about never locking their doors, but for the most part the answers were surprisingly and consistently "no," but for many different reasons.


Life before antibiotics and vaccines

Most of these tragic disease stories are from Gen Xers and boomers' parents and grandparents, but still, we're only a generation or two removed from communicable illnesses wiping out entire families.

"My grandmother had 7 children on a tuesday in 1936. One of them caught diphtheria. By saturday she had one living child. so..."

"It was typhus for my great grandparents. Lost kids 3 of 5 in one week. In Chicago."

"There's a cemetery on my property from the late 1800s, there were 6 kids in the family who all died within a calendar year due to a diphtheria epidemic. Newborn to 17 year old, all gone."

"This is doubly tragic because diphtheria antitoxin (which protected people who had the disease) was widely available by 1910, and diphtheria vaccine was manufactured by 1930."

"My grandmother was born in 1897. Her mother had 8 children but half her siblings died of Whooping Cough."

"My grandfather was only 1 of 6 that survived. The rest buried out back. Yea, so much better."

"I went to my local cemetery. There were three children from the same family. All under age five. Time of death was the early 1900's. We don't realize how good we have it nowadays."

"This is why vaccinations are so important. People forget that entire families were wiped out by illness."

"My dad’s sister got polio and recovered. Then she got it again and died at age 7, right before the vaccine was available. My grandma was never the same after that."

"That's why the Salk vaccine was such a huge thing in the 50s."

Food regulations, too

People like to complain about government regulations, but there's no question they've made a difference in food and packaging safety.

"A similar story in my family: in the late 1920s some cousins of my father bought ice cream from a street vendor. Three of the four of them died of botulism. They tried to sue, but the lawyers for Bad Ice Cream only accused them of bad parenting. They got nothing."

"I read a book about poverty in New York City in the 1920’s. It mentioned that the city gave away potted meat ( whatever that is) and a lot of children died after eating it. The parents couldn’t sue the city because it was considered a charitable act, the city meant well, and therefore they had immunity from the crime. Can you imagine?"


Rape and sexual assault happened a lot, people just didn't report it

Young folks today may not fully appreciate what life was like for the generations before the Me Too Movement. It's still hard to report and be believed, but it wasn't that long ago that nobody reported anything and swept it all under the rug.

"Particularly pedophilia. It was not spoken about so people did not know to be careful with their children."

"They were really good at sweeping it under the carpet."

"Yep rape, pedophelia, child and spousal abuse all grossly under reported. Even murder was - lynchings weren’t classified as murder and neither were the murders of 'undesirables' (eg prostitutes)."

"Unfortunately, most people who hurt children are not the 'random in the neighborhood.' It's a family member or trusted family friend (baseball coach, Boy Scout master, church leaders, etc). People often covered this up for the shame of the family and a misguided idea that it was 'protecting the victim.' Children were definitely not better protected from this behavior in the past."

"I'm from Boston. A ton of my own elder neighbors and their families were harmed by the priests in our neighborhood. They knew. Plenty of them absolutely knew. Sometimes mom would try to go to a higher up about it on behalf of her kid, and she'd get bullied/manipulated into not saying anything (hanging the threat of going to hell over her), and then they'd just move the priest onto some other church to hurt more kids. Families that were deeply involved in the religion were most susceptible to the hush up tactics."

"In our town, it was the Boy Scouts (late 60s-early 70s). As my age group grew up, it became known amongst the guys that the Scoutmaster REALLY, REALLY liked boys... It made me feel a lot better about not having joined up."

"Exactly. My mum was abused by an uncle as a kid. No consequences. We were all heavily abused for years by her second husband. Police wouldn't even respond. It was well known they had zero interest in "domestics." It wasn't safer, it just wasn't acknowledged."

More drunk drivers, less safe cars

Just the invention of back-up cameras and airbags alone has changed car accident mortality rates drastically. Car seat safety, seat belts, so many safety features we didn't have back then. Plus a lot more drunk driving awareness (though cell phone distraction has probably replaced a lot of those deaths).

"Cars were very unsafe back then. I knew one person personally, and several more indirectly that died in car wrecks. That really doesn't seem to happen so much anymore. No crumple zones, no collapsible steering columns, lots of angular metal hard surfaces, no anti-lock brakes. And, people didn't use seat belts very much back then."

"When I was in high school in the 80s, every yearbook had 2-4 "in memoriam" pages for the kids who died that year. It was car wrecks every year I was there. My own children went to the same high school. Classes of 2016 and 2019. During their 7 years at that school (with almost twice as many students) one child died in a freak accident."

"Growing up, there were several kids in my rural area who died. Car accident were the biggest killer."

"The cars we drove or rode in fifty years ago could not be sold as new cars today. Roads are safer. There is less drunk driving."

"The cars point is a big one and just one example of product safety. Products are a million times safer now than they used to be. And then the medical care if you do get hurt is likewise worlds better."

Survivor bias is a thing

There's a reason things have gotten safer besides just increased anxiety due to the internet. We also learned from our mistakes.

"Most of the many (many, many) children for whom being a kid back then was a nightmare of malnutrition, crippling disease, brutality, abuse, torture, and an early grave didn't get a chance to grow up to be grandmothers complaining about how much better the past was. So you're only going to get part of the story."

"It's called 'survivor bias.' You see it in all the boomer posts: 'We didn't wear seat belts (or whatever else), and we lived to tell about it!'

But some of their peers DIDN'T live to tell about it. Enough of them were seriously injured or killed that it was worth passing laws about seatbelts and car seats and not riding around in the back of pickups, etc.

Enough of their peers were kidnapped/r*ped/killed, that 'stranger danger' became a thing and parents realized that it might not be a great idea to let young children wander unsupervised for 12 hours a day.

In short, all the 'snowflake' safety measures we have in place today are thanks to previous generations being idiots and the prime example of what NOT to do."

"There's more than a little survivor bias at play when you hear stuff like 'we played with lawn darts and we're fine' or 'we didn't need helmets for our bicycles' or 'we didn't have life-threatening allergies like today.' Things weren't safer then but people weren't as aware of the dangers they were avoiding as we are now."

It's all in the perception

The internet may have been a mistake, at least when it comes to the flood of news and information we're bombarded with that makes it seem like terrible things are happening all around us all the time.

"It was less safe but the PERCEPTION of safety was higher. Just like how now it’s actually incredibly safe but the perception of danger is high."

"Statistically, it was less safe. But you only heard about issues in your local area, not the whole country, and news was something that for most only came in the form of the daily newspaper, and the evening news. So the perception was that it was safer."

"So true. Bad things happened but weren't blasted around the world in nano-seconds. I don't think it's any safer due to kids being micromanaged though. Technology and 'stranger danger' awareness have certainly had a positive impact on response times and prevention."

"Yes, this is the correct answer. I grew up in a very safe small town, where everyone assumed bad things didn't happen, but the internet age has shown us that not only do bad things happen everywhere, but they always did."

"We also weren't warned about things. Not like now. I recall in 1st grade one of my classmate - tallest girl in my class - suddenly didn't come back to school anymore. Our teacher told us it was because "a bad man did something bad to her so she will not coming back." And that was it. I never did find out what happened but I got the feeling later on that she was raped. A 6 year old."

"Exactly. The reason everyone feels less safe today is because of our news. 24 hours/7 days a week of it and good news doesn't sell. So you don't get much of that.

Violent crime in the US peaked in 1992. With the exception of some bumps, it's been going down since."

"This exactly. Before the internet and cable news you just didn't hear about things that happened outside of your town or even less so outside of your state. There was no 24 hour news, and therefore no need to constantly feed the outrage/fear machine to generate ad dollars like there is now. There has always been crime and there always will be, but crime was in fact much worse when I was a kid than it is now."

When we hear about hospitals running out of ICU beds and having to ration care, we may erroneously picture Hollywood movie scenes with frantic healthcare workers hustling constantly with patients and crash carts being frantically wheeled around.

That kind of hectic scene might happen in a single mass tragedy event in an emergency room, but a real ICU isn't like that, even when it's full. The ICU (Intensive Care Unit) is where patients go when they are severely ill or have sustained injuries that require ongoing, life-saving care. Saving lives in the ICU is a days, weeks, and sometimes even months-long endeavor, where nurses and doctors get to know patients a little before sending them home (which is always the hope) or saying goodbye (which has happened far too often in the past 18 months).

A crew from 4 News Now in Spokane was granted rare access to the ICU at Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center, where COVID-19 is taking a toll on doctors and nurses.


"We have 54 beds for adult critical care at Sacred Heart; 26 are in our general medical neuro-trauma ICU and 28 are in our cardiac ICU, but we have had to use the cardiac ICU beds also for COVID patients," ICU nurse manager Deb Gillette told 4 News Now. The hospital has also designated two additional floors for COVID patients who aren't sick enough to need ventilators.

You can hear the weariness in the voices of the doctors and nurses as they explain what they do to keep COVID patients alive and how hard the pandemic has been, even for people who are accustomed to critical care.

Watch this rare glimpse inside an ICU:

Inside the ICU: An exclusive look inside Providence Sacred Heart Medical Center's intensive carewww.youtube.com

The nurses interviewed pointed out that the age of those being admitted to the ICU has dropped from earlier in the pandemic, when it was mostly older patients. Now they're mostly seeing people in their 30s to 60s.

And the message they are sending is the same one we are hearing from ICU staff across the nation: "Get vaccinated."

"We're really trying here and the best thing our community can do is get vaccinated. We really have nothing else," nurse Emily Crews said. "That's our only solution and the more that people do that, the less time we'll spend in here, and the less time at home I'll be thinking about these people who are never going home."

This is the kind of coverage we need to see more of. When the overwhelming tragedy of the pandemic is happening inside hospital rooms where average Americans don't have access, it's far too easy to ignore numbers and pleas because it feels like it's not that bad.

It is that bad. Hospitals across the country are telling us it's bad. ICU workers are telling us it's bad. The past year and a half has been exhausting, but we can relieve some of the burden on healthcare workers by getting vaccinated as soon as we are able.

Since three coronavirus vaccines received emergency use authorization from the FDA early in 2021, the question of how to get a high percentage of the population vaccinated has haunted public health officials. As hospitals across the country fill with severely ill COVID-19 patients, the vast majority of whom are unvaccinated, the question remains.

A funeral home in North Carolina is taking a unique tack in advocating for vaccinations, one that's striking and to-the-point.

A truck advertised as Wilmore Funeral Home drove around Bank of America Stadium before the Carolina Panthers football game in Charlotte over the weekend, and it had a simple message: "Don't get vaccinated."


That message wouldn't be fitting from any other business, but from a funeral home, it's a morbidly appropriate joke. If you don't get vaccinated, they'll get more business. Blunt, but perhaps effective.

If you go to the Wilmore Funeral Home website, it's simply a landing page that says, "Get vaccinated. If not, see you soon." Again, blunt. If you click the "Get vaccinated" box, the page takes you to the StarMed Healthcare website where you can find places to get vaccinated in the Charlotte area.

According to the Charlotte Observer, the identity behind the truck is a mystery. There is no Wilmore Funeral Home, and StarMed Healthcare said it isn't behind it.

"If this saves one person's life by getting vaccinated, I'm 100% for it," Dr. Arin Piramzadian, chief medical officer at StarMed Healthcare, told the Observer.

"We know that 99% of people who are ending up in the hospital and dying are unvaccinated," Piramzadian said. "If that statistic does not scare people... I'm not sure what does. Perhaps a dark humor aspect such as this one does catch someone's attention."

It's hard to say what will convince people at this point, since asking nicely and asking not so nicely doesn't seem to be working, and loud and proud misinformation mongers seem to drown out legitimate educational efforts. Maybe seeing statistics from hospitals showing how many more unvaccinated patients are in the ICU will convince people. Or maybe seeing a funeral truck with an invitation to bring them more business will do it.

Either way, clever move. Well done, whoever you are.

Vaccines are without a doubt one of the most impactful scientific advancements in human history. Through vaccines, we eliminated smallpox, have nearly eliminated polio worldwide, and have saved countless lives through protection from a host of other infectious diseases. Yet even with that history, millions of Americans are refusing the coronavirus vaccines and decrying efforts to mandate proof of vaccination to partake in certain activities.

A Twitter post is serving as a timely reminder that vaccination isn't new and neither are proof-of-immunization requirements. The post shows a polio record card from 1956 that the poster found at the thrift store where they work. And the real kicker here is that COVID is actually far deadlier than polio ever was.

COVID-19 has killed nearly 670,000 Americans in the past year and a half. We are just days away from surpassing the death toll from the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic. Those numbers are staggering in comparison with the polio epidemic, which at its peak in 1952, killed 3,000 Americans in one year. Thousands more were paralyzed, but nowhere near hundreds of thousands in the span of a year.


I'm not trying to downplay polio—it's a terrible disease. It was especially scary because primarily impacted children, but by every other measure, the COVID pandemic is far worse than the polio epidemic ever was. In deaths, there's no comparison. In long-term effects, we simply don't know yet. COVID isn't leaving people paralyzed like polio did, but "long COVID" is a thing and organ damage caused by COVID can lead to a host of ongoing health problems.

People downplay COVID by saying most people who get the virus don't get severely sick, but the same is true of polio. According to the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, around 70% of polio cases are totally asymptomic, and another 25% have just mild symptoms. Less than 1% of cases result in paralysis, and far fewer result in death.

And yet, we never hear people say, "We should just take our chances with polio, since most people who get it are fine!" We still vaccinate for it, even though the chances of getting it in the U.S. is practically nil at this point because vaccination has eradicated it.

Some people don't trust the coronavirus vaccines because they think they were approved for use too quickly. But do you know how long it was between the start of clinical trials for the polio vaccine to when it was approved? Less than a year. Clinical trials for the Salk polio vaccine began on 1.8 million children (650,000 of whom got the vaccine, with 1.2 million getting a placebo) on April 26, 1954 and the vaccine was approved April 12, 1955. It wasn't without controversy, of course, but the success of the vaccine speaks for itself.

That was nearly seven decades ago. Think of how far medical research has come since then and how much greater our understanding of infectious disease and immunology is now. We already had enormous amounts of base knowledge about coronaviruses in general, decades of mRNA research under our belt, and more than a decade of mRNA vaccine development already underway, so the quickly developed and tested COVID vaccines are not terribly surprising.

As for proof of vaccination complaints, the polio card post also prompted a flood of other photos of immunization "passports," from record books to reminders that people with smallpox inoculations had to literally show the scar on their arm to prove that they'd been vaccinated.

The military has been required to get vaccines for pretty much ever.

And yes, people with smallpox vaccinations used to have to lift their shirt sleeves to show that they'd been immunized before being allowed to enter some public places.

Sometimes a "vaccine passport" is literally called a vaccine passport. And many jobs have long required them.

One of the unfortunate side effects of living in the information age is that we spend so much time battling misinformation. I recall predictions from disease specialists in March 2020 that we may lose 100,000 to 200,000 Americans to COVID-19, and people scoffing about fearmongering. Here we are 18 months and 680,000 deaths later, still having to convince people that COVID is real, the pandemic is serious, vaccination is good, and requiring proof of immunization for life-threatening infectious disease is not an authoritarian power-grab.

If you're immunized for polio, which you most probably are, being immunized for coronavirus should be a no brainer. The risk of COVID is much higher, the vaccines have had ample time for testing in comparison to the early days of polio immunization, and the vaccines have been proven safe and effective according to the vast majority of people who are qualified to evaluate such things.

We're all tired of this stupid pandemic. Please do your part and get vaccinated if you are able.