All The Baby Boomers Should Be Dead By Now
We hurtled through life reckless and unafraid, unaware of the dangerous, high-risk, perilous childhood that characterized our generation.
How are any of us still alive? That was my first thought when I read an article about baby boomers embracing healthy lifestyles to stave off decrepitude.
By any measure, we should all be dead. We hurtled through life reckless and unafraid, unaware of the dangerous, high-risk, perilous childhood that characterized our generation.
You’ve already heard about how we never wore bike helmets, ricocheted like loose cannonballs in the back of station wagons because we didn’t wear seatbelts, and clambered high on rickety gym sets erected on earth as hard as concrete. If we fell, we would have broken all our bones.
But did you know our parents used DDT outside the house for bagworms and in our bedrooms for spiders?
And even worse, our houses were full of lead paint. My parakeet died from breathing paint fumes when one of the bedrooms was painted, even though I moved the bird to another room.
My sister-in-law had an asbestos rock and a lead rock in her rock collection, and those Redi-kilowatt glow-in-the-dark toys were radium or…
