As children, we drove (those who were lucky enough to have it) without seat belts and without airbags! The medicine bottles did not have special closures. We drank water from the garden hose or from the public fountain in the Archi district (Ragusa Ibla) not from a bottle. What a horror!!
We rode our bikes without using a helmet. We spent afternoons building our "toy carts" (Calacipitu). We jumped off the slopes and forgot we didn't have the brakes until we crashed into a tree or a sidewalk. And after numerous incidents, we were learning to solve the problem… we alone !!!
We left the house in the morning and played all day; our parents didn't know exactly where we were, yet they knew we weren't in danger. There were no cell phones. Incredible!!
We got abrasions, we broke our bones or teeth… and there were never any complaints, they were just accidents: no one was to blame. We had fights, sometimes bruises. And even if they hurt us and sometimes we cried, they soon passed; most of the time without our parents ever knowing.
We ate sweets, bread with lots of butter and drinks full of sugar… but none of us were obese. We shared a Fanta with 4 other friends, from the same bottle, and no one ever died from germs. We didn't have the Playstation, nor the Nintendo, nor any video games.
Neither cable TV, nor videotapes, nor PCs, nor internet; we just had friends. We went out of the house and found them. We went, by bike or on foot, to their house, rang the bell or went in and talked to them. Imagine: without asking permission! Alone! In the cold and cruel world! Without control!
How did we survive ?!
We did incredible bike races without having to do the slalom between parked cars, wild parking lots and exhaust gases… at the most we had to be careful of the ditch next to the road and the holes on it.
We invented games with sticks and stones.
We played with worms and other pets and, despite the parents' warnings, no one took an eye off another with a branch and our stomachs did not fill with worms.
The maximum of technology was reached by "making up" the crown caps of the soft drinks with which we competed, hitting them with the fingers, on roads and pavements in incredible championships that gilded whole days and ended because you had run out of healthy fingers ... The roads, at least those of Ibla, were paved with smooth stones and resistant to all bad weather.
Some students weren't as smart as others and had to retake second grade. What a horror!!!
The grades were not changed, for any reason. The worst problems in school were delays or if someone chewed a cigarette in the classroom. Our initiatives were ours. And the consequences, too. No one was hiding behind another. The idea that our parents would defend us if we transgressed a law did not come close to us; they were always on the side of the law.
If you misbehaved your parents would have punished you and no one would put them in jail for it. We knew that when parents said "NO", it really meant NO. We received new toys for birthdays and for Christmas, not every time we went to the supermarket.
Our parents gave us gifts with love, not out of guilt. And our lives weren't ruined because they didn't give us everything we wanted. We had freedom, failure, success and responsibility, and we learned to manage them.
Today we are what we are: proud and happy to have lived a period of carefree youth, and always trying to convey the optimism that can and must be the engine of the new youth to face the present and the near future.
Salvatore Battaglia
President of the Academy of Prefi
