"Life Was Good" memories

I remember those good old days when suffering was a part of daily life, and hardly worth a mention.  Kids with whooping cough did not make the news; all of us kids had  it, and measles, mumps and chicken pox as well.  We lived near a bridge and it was a common sight to see a child, always a boy, carrying a sack of kittens weighted down with a rock to drop off the bridge, on the orders of the parents.  A box of abandoned kittens would not have made the papers at all.  We at one time lived near an abandoned country schoolhouse which was the site of regular dropoffs of kittens and cats.  If a dog bit someone, or otherwise misbehaved, the owner would shoot it himself or have a gun-owning friend do it.  No one would have thought of reporting it, even if they knew where to do so.  One local farmer, conceding to modern times, bought a tractor, and so dug a very large pit, lined his docile old  team of horses up at the edge and shot them.  The scene was witnessed by my aunt, and she said the first horse was easy, but the second one went berserk when he saw what happened to his longtime partner.  No story there either. Child battering was pretty common then too, and nobody thought too much about it.  Schoolchildren, again always boys, were sent to the principal's office and would return to the classroom crying so hard they couldn't do their classwork, having been disciplined by a 6-foot principal who had a stick and a military background.  Nobody reported it, not even the kids to their parents. There was a boy, who was probably gay, though nobody, probably not even he himself, knew what that meant.  He was regularly  de-pantsed (meaning exactly that) in the school bathroom.  I think everybody must have known, but again, not newsworthy.  Too bad today's local TV reporters don't have such a wide variety of atrocities to choose from.  Then we wouldn't have to be bombarded by the images of a puppy missing its toes.