Those who are now somewhere between forty and sixty were formed in an information field where danger lurked everywhere: from a plate of soup to a TV screen. Today, looking at it, you understand that all this mythology was just an attempt by adults to somehow control the chaos.
Anatomy of the Absurd
Our physiology suffered the most. Take, for example, the big sweet lie that too much sugar will cause something to stick together. With age, it became clear that sweets can cause insulin problems, excess weight, and a dentist's bill, but the threat of anatomical sticking remained a myth.
Or frogs. For years, innocent amphibians bore the brunt of warts until medicine opened our eyes to the papillomavirus. That's where big mosquitoes go too—those awkward creatures with long legs that everyone called malaria-carrying, even though they're actually incapable of drinking blood at all.
A separate category is mystical injuries. If you make a face and the wind blows at that time, you will remain that way. If you squint your eyes and get a cut on the back of your head, that's it. We believed in all of this. As well as the fact that stepping over a person blocks their growth, and tight swaddling guarantees the child straight legs (the genes, as it turned out, were completely indifferent to the efforts of grandmothers).
Technological illusions
A thousand points in the game “Electronics”, where the wolf catches eggs. They said that after this number, a cartoon would be shown on a small monochrome screen. How many nerve cells were spent for the sake of an ending that simply did not exist.
And TVs? This eternal fear of replacing the kinescope with a Dendy or Sega console. Time has put everything in its place: the same kinescope TVs have long been living out their lives in landfills, but old consoles and cartridges have become a collector's rarity, for which they now ask for quite real money.
The same was true for vision. We were forbidden to sit closer than a kilometer to a screen, lest we go blind. I wonder how this theory works now, when we fall asleep and wake up with a smartphone screen ten centimeters from our faces?
Punitive cooking and everyday life
The food of our childhood is a separate genre of compulsion. Soup was elevated to the rank of religion. It was believed that without hot liquid at lunch, the stomach would inevitably curl into a tube. It turned out that the human body is quite capable of functioning for years without a single plate of borscht. Bread, which had to be eaten with absolutely everything, from pasta to watermelon, also lost its position.
Ice cream and wet feet were considered the main culprits of colds. The fact that people get sick from viruses and bacteria, and not from hypothermia or a portion of ice cream, has not yet reached many people. But tap water was drunk calmly back then. The irony is that this was considered the norm.
Education as a deception
School consistently fed us fears about the future. The main horror story: “if you study for A’s, you’ll become a janitor.” Life demonstrated an impressive sense of humor. Grades turned out to be just numbers in a magazine. Third-graders opened businesses, and honors students went to work for them in the accounting department.
We were told about the deep hidden meanings that authors put into their works. Although most of the classics, I suspect, wrote for a fee or simply because they were bored.
Math teachers used to say that we should learn formulas and do the math in our heads because “you're not going to carry a calculator with you all the time.” Well, now I carry a supercomputer in my pocket, and I sometimes make phone calls from it. I've never needed sines and cotangents.
Alcohol and cigarettes were served under the guise of “not for children, this is for adults only.” Instead of explaining the banal harm to any organism, this created a perfect attractive picture of the forbidden fruit. “I will grow up and I will smoke too,” we thought, and many successfully implemented this plan.
Instead of an epilogue
And, perhaps, the biggest illusion we were made to believe in was the stories about how unbreakable this union was. Time has shown that everything crumbles, especially that which is based on fear, lies, and the prohibition of thinking for oneself.
Somehow. If you have any favorite horror stories from those times stuck in your memory, leave them in the comments. It will be interesting to read.
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⚡ Readers' Pulse
How do you feel about those parental horror stories now – was it an effective parenting method or a pointless absurdity?
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