Sometimes I hate getting older

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The other day I was shopping in a local natural food store when the cashier asked me if I wanted a plastic bag or a paper bag.  I said I wanted a plastic bag because I used them at home for trash.  She looked at me strangely and said that paper would be more environmentally friendly. I smiled and stuck with the plastic.

As I was leaving the store I flashed back on my childhood growing up in the 40s and 50s and smiled.

In those years milk was delivered to our home in bottles. When finished we would leave them on the back porch for the milkman to pick up where they were sent back to the milk company to be washed, sterilized, refilled and redelivered.

Back then stairs everywhere were the norm. Escalators were not in every store, and an elevator was run by an elevator guy that did more than just push a button and even department stores had stairs that took you up to the next floor.

If we needed groceries we would walk to the store instead of driving a couple of blocks and spending a fortune on gasoline.

Mothers used to wash diapers because throwaways had not been created yet.

After clothes came out of the washing machine, if you were affluent enough to own one, the clothes were hung on a clothes’ line to dry in the sun and wind instead of a super-powered dryer that created havoc on the electric bill. If you didn’t own a washing machine it was common to take a trip on a bicycle with a bag of laundry to wash at the Laundromat. 

Families with more than one kid used to recycle clothes until the youngest couldn’t fit in them anymore. Then they were given to friends that had kids that could fit in them. To buy a new t-shirt or a new pair of jeans was a real treat and they were worn until they fell apart.

When televisions first came out I used to go upstairs to our neighbors to watch. When we finally got one we only had one. Not one in every room.

In our kitchen the only electric appliance was the refrigerator and all preparations were done by hand and cooked on the stove or in the oven, which ran on gas. Each room had one electrical outlet and we used extension cords like crazy.

To get exercise we played ball everyday or had a paper route that was facilitated by foot or bike and to get to school, walking a mile or two was matter-of-fact.  And on a Saturday, if we wanted to go shopping downtown, we never thought twice about taking the bus.

Our moms were stay-at-home moms and were there everyday when we got home from school.  And after football, swimming or track practice, as exhausted as we were, we simply walked home. And never once gave a thought to using our moms or dads as a “taxi” service, despite the fact that gas was only $.25 per gallon.

What I remember the most and the fondest was always respecting my parents and always listening to them. The two things that were never lacking were the sincerity and the love. It was what made family a family.

I came to Hawaii in the 70s with a backpack. Now, I have a home full of stuff and a storage locker full of stuff that I can’t find a place for in the house.  

But, it doesn’t end here.

To all you peeps out there that survived the 30’s, 40’s 50’s 60’s and 70’s; this is our entry into Ripley’s history.

First, we survived being born to mothers who smoked and/or drank while they were pregnant.

They took aspirin, ate blue cheese dressing, tuna from a can, and didn’t get tested for diabetes.

Then, after that trauma, we were put to sleep on our tummies in baby cribs covered with bright colored lead-based paints.

We had no childproof lids on medicine bottles and were not restricted from opening doors or cabinets.

When we rode our bikes we had no helmets, not to mention the risks we took hitchhiking.

As infants and children, we would ride in cars with no car seats, booster seats, seat belts or air bags and riding in the back of pick-up truck on a warm day was a special treat.

We drank water from the garden hose and NOT from a bottle and there was no such thing as fluoride.

We shared one soda with four friends, all drinking from the same bottle and no one died from this.

We ate Twinkies, Devil Dogs, Yankee Doodles, JUJUBES, jellybeans, red licorice sticks, Hostess creamed-filled cupcakes, white bread with butter and drank Kool-Aid, but were never over-weight because we were always playing outside.

We would leave home in the morning and play all day as long as we were back home when the streetlights came on and our parents never freaked out or called the cops despite not being able to reach us all day.

We would spend hours building go-carts out of old boxes and roller skates and then ride down the hill, only to find out we forgot the brakes. After running into the bushes, trees, cars and buildings, we figured it out.

We never had Playstations, Nintendo’s, X-boxes, or video games. We never had 150 channels on cable, no video movies or DVD’s. We had no surround-sound, CD’s, cell phones, personal computers, Internet, or chat rooms.

We had friends and we went outside to find them.

We fell out of trees, got cut, broke bones and teeth and never, ever, was there a lawsuit from this. And doctors routinely made house calls.

We ate worms and mud pies made from dirt, and the worms never lived in us forever.

We were given BB guns as a birthday gift and we played stickball on the sides of building by drawing a strike zone on the building and stoopball. And, despite being told it would happen, we never got our eyes poked out or hit by a car

We rode bikes or walked to a friend’s house and knocked on the door or rang the bell or just walked in and talked to them. And their mom’s always gave us milk and cookies.

If we didn’t make a Little League team, we dealt with the disappointment and moved on. Imagine that!

The idea of our parents bailing us out if we broke the law was unheard of because they always sided with the law.

We never had GMO’s laden with pesticides and we had no Monsanto. When we saw the movie “Soylent Green” in 1973, which was a futuristic depiction of NYC in 2022, with a population of 40 million and where the food supply was the dead people being fed back to the living, we could not relate to 2022. Now it is a frightening 2 years away and the horror of what’s to come scares the crap out of us.

Those generations produced some of the best minds, risk-takers, problem solvers and inventors ever and the past 50 years have been an explosion of innovation and new ideas.

We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned how to deal with it all. If you are one of them, I take my hat off to you.

You might want to share this with others who have had the good fortune to grow up as kids before the lawyers and the government regulated so much of our lives for our own good!

And while you’re at it, let your kids know how brave, lucky and fortunate their parents were.  Sure makes you want to a good look at today, doesn’t it?

And, in closing, with hurricanes, tornadoes, fires out of control, severe thunderstorms tearing up the country from one end to another, nuclear disasters, the threat of bird flu, Gardasil vaccines now being mandated for boys, every illness now is the corona virus, terrorist attacks, taxation out of control, genetically modified politicians, same sex marriage being legalized, riots and OCCUPY this and OCCUPY that and more of our Constitutional rights being stripped away from us on a daily basis, are we sure this is a good time to take God out of the Pledge of Allegiance?

Aloha!

Source:

My Life!

Hesh Goldstein
When I was a kid, if I were told that I'd be writing a book about diet and nutrition when I was older, let alone having been doing a health related radio show for over 36 years, I would've thought that whoever told me that was out of their mind. Living in Newark, New Jersey, my parents and I consumed anything and everything that had a face or a mother except for dead, rotting, pig bodies, although we did eat bacon (as if all the other decomposing flesh bodies were somehow miraculously clean). Going through high school and college it was no different. In fact, my dietary change did not come until I was in my 30's.

Just to put things in perspective, after I graduated from Weequahic High School and before going to Seton Hall University, I had a part-time job working for a butcher. I was the delivery guy and occasionally had to go to the slaughterhouse to pick up products for the store. Needless to say, I had no consciousness nor awareness, as change never came then despite the horrors I witnessed on an almost daily basis.

After graduating with a degree in accounting from Seton Hall, I eventually got married and moved to a town called Livingston. Livingston was basically a yuppie community where everyone was judged by the neighborhood they lived in and their income. To say it was a "plastic" community would be an understatement.

Livingston and the shallowness finally got to me. I told my wife I was fed up and wanted to move. She made it clear she had to be near her friends and New York City. I finally got my act together and split for Colorado.

I was living with a lady in Aspen at the end of 1974, when one day she said, " let's become vegetarians". I have no idea what possessed me to say it, but I said, "okay"! At that point I went to the freezer and took out about $100 worth of frozen, dead body parts and gave them to a welfare mother who lived behind us. Well, everything was great for about a week or so, and then the chick split with another guy.

So here I was, a vegetarian for a couple weeks, not really knowing what to do, how to cook, or basically how to prepare anything. For about a month, I was getting by on carrot sticks, celery sticks, and yogurt. Fortunately, when I went vegan in 1990, it was a simple and natural progression. Anyway, as I walked around Aspen town, I noticed a little vegetarian restaurant called, "The Little Kitchen".

Let me back up just a little bit. It was April of 1975, the snow was melting and the runoff of Ajax Mountain filled the streets full of knee-deep mud. Now, Aspen was great to ski in, but was a bummer to walk in when the snow was melting.

I was ready to call it quits and I needed a warmer place. I'll elaborate on that in a minute.

But right now, back to "The Little Kitchen". Knowing that I was going to leave Aspen and basically a new vegetarian, I needed help. So, I cruised into the restaurant and told them my plight and asked them if they would teach me how to cook. I told them in return I would wash dishes and empty their trash. They then asked me what I did for a living and I told them I was an accountant.

The owner said to me, "Let's make a deal. You do our tax return and we'll feed you as well". So for the next couple of weeks I was doing their tax return, washing their dishes, emptying the trash, and learning as much as I could.

But, like I said, the mud was getting to me. So I picked up a travel book written by a guy named Foder. The name of the book was, "Hawaii". Looking through the book I noticed that in Lahaina, on Maui, there was a little vegetarian restaurant called," Mr. Natural's". I decided right then and there that I would go to Lahaina and work at "Mr. Natural's." To make a long story short, that's exactly what happened.

So, I'm working at "Mr. Natural's" and learning everything I can about my new dietary lifestyle - it was great. Every afternoon we would close for lunch at about 1 PM and go to the Sheraton Hotel in Ka'anapali and play volleyball, while somebody stayed behind to prepare dinner.

Since I was the new guy, and didn't really know how to cook, I never thought that I would be asked to stay behind to cook dinner. Well, one afternoon, that's exactly what happened; it was my turn. That posed a problem for me because I was at the point where I finally knew how to boil water.

I was desperate, clueless and basically up the creek without a paddle. Fortunately, there was a friend of mine sitting in the gazebo at the restaurant and I asked him if he knew how to cook. He said the only thing he knew how to cook was enchiladas. He said that his enchiladas were bean-less and dairy-less. I told him that I had no idea what an enchilada was or what he was talking about, but I needed him to show me because it was my turn to do the evening meal.

Well, the guys came back from playing volleyball and I'm asked what was for dinner. I told them enchiladas; the owner wasn't thrilled. I told him that mine were bean-less and dairy-less. When he tried the enchilada he said it was incredible. Being the humble guy that I was, I smiled and said, "You expected anything less"? It apparently was so good that it was the only item on the menu that we served twice a week. In fact, after about a week, we were selling five dozen every night we had them on the menu and people would walk around Lahaina broadcasting, 'enchilada's at "Natural's" tonight'. I never had to cook anything else.

A year later the restaurant closed, and somehow I gravitated to a little health food store in Wailuku. I never told anyone I was an accountant and basically relegated myself to being the truck driver. The guys who were running the health food store had friends in similar businesses and farms on many of the islands. I told them that if they could organize and form one company they could probably lock in the State. That's when they found out I was an accountant and "Down to Earth" was born. "Down to Earth" became the largest natural food store chain in the islands, and I was their Chief Financial Officer and co-manager of their biggest store for 13 years.

In 1981, I started to do a weekly radio show to try and expose people to a vegetarian diet and get them away from killing innocent creatures. I still do that show today. I pay for my own airtime and have no sponsors to not compromise my honesty. One bit of a hassle was the fact that I was forced to get a Masters Degree in Nutrition to shut up all the MD's that would call in asking for my credentials.

My doing this radio show enabled me, through endless research, to see the corruption that existed within the big food industries, the big pharmaceutical companies, the biotech industries and the government agencies. This information, unconscionable as it is, enabled me to realize how broken our health system is. This will be covered more in depth in the Introduction and throughout the book and when you finish the book you will see this clearly and it will hopefully inspire you to make changes.

I left Down to Earth in 1989, got nationally certified as a sports injury massage therapist and started traveling the world with a bunch of guys that were making a martial arts movie. After doing that for about four years I finally made it back to Honolulu and got a job as a massage therapist at the Honolulu Club, one of Hawaii's premier fitness clubs. It was there I met the love of my life who I have been with since 1998. She made me an offer I couldn't refuse. She said," If you want to be with me you've got to stop working on naked women". So, I went back into accounting and was the Chief Financial Officer of a large construction company for many years.

Going back to my Newark days when I was an infant, I had no idea what a "chicken" or "egg" or "fish" or "pig" or "cow" was. My dietary blueprint was thrust upon me by my parents as theirs was thrust upon them by their parents. It was by the grace of God that I was able to put things in their proper perspective and improve my health and elevate my consciousness.

The road that I started walking down in 1975 has finally led me to the point of writing my book, “A Sane Diet For An Insane World”. Hopefully, the information contained herein will be enlightening, motivating, and inspiring to encourage you to make different choices. Doing what we do out of conditioning is not always the best course to follow. I am hoping that by the grace of the many friends and personalities I have encountered along my path, you will have a better perspective of what road is the best road for you to travel on, not only for your health but your consciousness as well.

Last but not least: after being vaccinated as a kid I developed asthma, which plagued me all of my life. In 2007 I got exposed to the organic sulfur crystals, which got rid of my asthma in 3 days and has not come back in over 10 years. That, being the tip of the iceberg, has helped people reverse stage 4 cancers, autism, joint pain, blood pressure problems, migraine headaches, erectile dysfunction, gingivitis, and more. Also, because of the detoxification effects by the release of oxygen that permeates and heals all the cells in the body, it removes parasites, radiation, fluoride, free radicals, and all the other crap that is thrust upon us in the environment by Big Business.

For more, please view www.healthtalkhawaii.com and www.asanediet.com.

Namaste!