People who do not listen to their instincts or intuitions are usually the first to wind up dead.
I like to tell a story which is true about my father and I in a city where I was trying to step out into the street and my father grabbed my shirt and prevented me from being hit by a bus which went by so close I was within a few inches of my nose touching the bus.
Another time we were working in an attic on the electricity when I was 8 or 9 years old and a hornet got under my t-shirt and stung me about 20 times. I started to run across the roof rafters in panic from being stung. My father grabbed my t-shirt so I couldn't run and killed the hornet with his bare hands through my t-shirt. If he had not stopped me I would have run out a side entrance to the attic in this house and either broken both legs in the fall to earth or have been killed. I was too young to be disciplined enough to endure the pain of the 20 stings on my chest and make a good decision. If it had been my decision I would have died there likely that day.
Having the presence of mind of knowing what to do in these kinds of situations is very adult and not the realm of most children. But, both of these times my father saved my life by acting quickly and concisely.
Yes. You might also say that what business did I have at age 8 or 9 years old being in an attic walking on roof rafters so I didn't fall through the ceiling below me? Well I could be very insistent in wanting to be around my Dad and even working with him fixing things. And as a result I learned to be an electrician starting more formally at age 12 during the summers and I started to get paid for working with him too.
So, though many of you might say I had no business being in a dangerous attic in the first place it is important to note that life was very different in 1957 or 1958 to what it is now in the U.S. too. And children were thought of as something completely different then than now. Children were often thought of as miniature adults then and treated as such like I was. Now often, children are treated like pets like French poodles and other lap dogs and they don't grow up to be like people did in the 1950s and 1960s anymore either. Is this good or bad? I would say it's both.
People are different now, not better or worse just different than in the 1950s and 1960s from my present point of view having lived through all that myself. In fact I could say the same thing of people I met who were born closer to the Civil War that I met. The biggest difference was that they were all mostly racist but not in the way you might think. They were very clannish would be the right word. If they were English Americans they hung out with English Americans and if they were Scottish Americans they hung out with Scottish Americans and the same for every other nation and often the different groups from different countries would fight each other in gangs. So, it wasn't just a white black thing it was nation against nation depending upon where you came from in the 1950s more.
This has somewhat changed now over the years but this hasn't entirely gone away either. It just depends upon each person and how well traveled they are and how educated they are now mostly now.
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