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If Leave it to Beaver truly mirrored real life as it was back then, here's what the character descriptions might look like:
Ward Cleaver: Alcoholic, workaholic, beats his sons with a belt. Bones his secretary on the side. His country club won't allow minorities or Jews to be members. The neighborhood where he bought his home is deed-restricted to white Anglo-Saxon protestant homeowners only. Drives drunk.
June Cleaver: Pops prescription Nembutal (see Mother's Little Helper by the Rolling Stones), and has an unlimited refills script for amphetamine-based diet pills. Her woman's club membership restrictions mirror her husband's country club. Drives high.
Wally Cleaver: Pretends to like girls because of what he faces from family, friends, church and community if he were to be outed.
Beaver Cleaver: As the baby of the family, he's spoiled rotten. Wally resents him and makes his life as miserable as he can. Beaver has been regularly sexually abused by his pastor and little league coach since he was 5, but is afraid to say anything lest his abusers carry out their threats of killing his parents.
Laughed out loud over this one!
You know, everything wasn't always perfect at the Cleaver house, though. I was watching LITB reruns a few years back, and often Ward made references to his father beating him or being abusive in other ways. Also, there's an episode with the local handyman who is looking for work around the house, and Ward asks him if he is over his "troubles", and the handyman says yes, and somehow he ends up getting Beaver to give him the bottle of rum that June was using for her baking--he's an alcoholic. I found it interesting that they dealt with that back then.
Where you live do most of the kids have a father who is prison and a mother who smokes crack ? Are you from the projects or the trailer parks ?
You'd be surprised but many of addicts of hard drugs like Heroin and Crack are from wealthy suburban areas. Sadly, the open air drug market of hard drugs in American inner cities is a vital part of the economy in every major metropolitan area. I watched a 20/20 special about Camden, New Jersey a few years ago in which they revealed a huge percentage of the people buying hard drugs in Camden were bored mostly White upper middle class kids from a wealthy suburban town only a ten miles away. In fact, Heroin use by suburbanites has been increasing in recent years.
That being said, my family wasn't always perfect either. By the time my siblings and I had become teenagers we very wild. At one point my sister was strung out on Heroin and my parents didn't even know. Even though my family relocated to a nice house in a safe quiet neighborhood in the posh suburbs in Maryland, my sister would commute into the depths of the hood in Baltimore to cop dope every week. Her and her ex-husband told me that they wasted two years of their lives chasing the dragon before they got clean without rehab.
I grewup i a fmily that was pretty typical of the family in 50's TV really. Mother and father who were great parents and as I loo back thsoe wre great years growing up i the mid 50 thru mid 60's. I alos knew many other in my neighborhood that experienced the same. I look around and I see the children now parents doing the same.So yes here are millions of families like described by Op with mnany disfunctional familes as well.
If Leave it to Beaver truly mirrored real life as it was back then, here's what the character descriptions might look like:
Ward Cleaver: Alcoholic, workaholic, beats his sons with a belt. Bones his secretary on the side. His country club won't allow minorities or Jews to be members. The neighborhood where he bought his home is deed-restricted to white Anglo-Saxon protestant homeowners only. Drives drunk.
June Cleaver: Pops prescription Nembutal (see Mother's Little Helper by the Rolling Stones), and has an unlimited refills script for amphetamine-based diet pills. Her woman's club membership restrictions mirror her husband's country club. Drives high.
Wally Cleaver: Pretends to like girls because of what he faces from family, friends, church and community if he were to be outed.
Beaver Cleaver: As the baby of the family, he's spoiled rotten. Wally resents him and makes his life as miserable as he can. Beaver has been regularly sexually abused by his pastor and little league coach since he was 5, but is afraid to say anything lest his abusers carry out their threats of killing his parents.
I don't believe there is anything that you could label "perfect." I know several "very happy" families with well-behaved children, who spend a lot of time together doing outdoor and indoor activities, little TV, considerate of others, work hard, deal with the ups and downs of life, and volunteer. I'm sure they have difficulties, as do we all, but are they "perfect?' Hardly.
to me, my family is "prefect" we butt heads every once in a while, but we are very happy, my parents are stable and very happily married, we were raised with good manners, and are generally "nice" kids, none of us smoke, drink (beyond 1 glass of wine now and then on a rare occasion) no drugs, none of us have criminal recoreds, no anger issues, no rape or molestation...my most traumatic expereinces growing up were getting whooping cough when i was 4 and then getting bacterial memegitis multiple times.
but as a family we are overweight...and like i said, we do butt heads once in a while...
so does that make us "not perfect"
cause quite frankly...im VERY happy with how my family is despite the small flaws.
Finding a perfect family is as common as finding Prince Charming. Fairy tales are for kids. I know some wonderful, loving families, but all have had difficulties along the way because families are made up of imperfect people.
I really like your post.
The only perfection a family can achieve is to love each other no matter what because they belong to each other. Everything else is a standard made up in the foolish minds of society.
I grewup i a fmily that was pretty typical of the family in 50's TV really. Mother and father who were great parents and as I loo back thsoe wre great years growing up i the mid 50 thru mid 60's. I alos knew many other in my neighborhood that experienced the same. I look around and I see the children now parents doing the same.So yes here are millions of families like described by Op with mnany disfunctional familes as well.
Me too. Totally won the lottery on great parents. Only we didn't have a white picket fence. We had a redwood split rail around the family homestead.
'Course we lived a few miles from the large mouse in the photo above so, I don't know, maybe there was something in the water affecting the growth of the neighborhood vermin we didn't quite grasp.
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