In another, Swedish preachers similarly condemned the phone as hellspawn and people sabotaged telephone lines, fearing that they attracted evil spirits. Whether the demon spirits were supposedly communicating the messages -- somehow enslaved by the telephone -- or whether they were just seizing the opportunity to overhear who in Helsingborg made the best fiskbullar, I do not know. What I do know is, if you could work out the logic you'd have a tall, blond, alcohol-fueled prequel to The Ring.

That's two strikes against tomatoes: They're related to a plant that seems like it was genetically engineered to murder children and eating them was sometimes followed by death. So, it's somewhat surprising that a lot of Europeans grew tomatoes anyway. What could motivate these cautious Europeans to cultivate death plants in their homes? They grew them just because they were so dang pretty. Yeah, try giving the love of your life one of those bad boys on Valentine's Day.

Like a spherical femme fatale stuffed into a red dress, I imagine the tomato inspired conversations like:

"Oh darling, let's not grow tomatoes. They're big, brightly colored sacks of poison. What if one of the children eats one and dies?"
"Dearest, we live in 16th-century Europe. If we start worrying about what might kill the children, we'll never get anything done."
"Your modern thinking is enlightening."

Digital Vision./DigitalVision/Getty
Wait, that's not a child. That's a goat. Feed it tomatoes!

This means that tomatoes sat in people's homes, staring at them, brighter than anything they'd seen before, more flavorful than anything they'd tasted, yet they thought they couldn't eat them. All because their plates were toxic. Well, if sitcoms have taught us anything, it's that a precarious situation like that can't last long. Yep, figuring out their silly little mix-up just took Europe a mere 200 years.

The clincher was when pizza was finally invented, because nobody could argue with pizza. Only after all of that did tomatoes begin to catch on in the United States. Think about that: People in what is now Mexico had been eating tomatoes since before they had writing, but it took over 200 years and a trip across the Atlantic and back for people in the United States to say, "You know, I think we should eat these motherfuckers!"

At this point, most of us are clear on the moral panic cycle of pop music: The younger generation pushes boundaries further than their parents, their parents say, "I was a cool kid, but this! This is too far!" Their kids don't listen, get grounded/hurt/arrested/cool tattoos, and if that doesn't define their entire life, they grow up and have little kids who can scandalize them one day. This has been happening forever. Jazz didn't destroy our youth -- neither did Elvis, The Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, KISS, Judas Priest, NWA, 2Pac, or Eminem.

But that's been around forever, right? The '40s thought of jazz as "moral degeneration" because it was played in bars. Parents of the 1950s thought rock 'n' roll was sex-fueled Satan music. The '60s were going to be destroyed by the hippie music that promoted drug use, sexual freedom, and rebellion against the government and military. The '70s were going to destroy us all because their music sucked. And also all of the cocaine that went along with the nightlife. Music from the '80s was a cocaine funnel ... oh, and that whole "devil music" thing popped up again when metal got big. Even the shitty hair metal bands were supposedly minions of Lucifer. And 1990s gangsta rap was supposed to obliterate our youth by turning them all into gang-bangers. Then Marilyn Manson happened. Whatever. We're all still here.

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Well ... mostly.

Looking back, it's hard to even believe a previous generation's prissy mindset. Today, refusing to show Elvis' hips on The Ed Sullivan Show seems as implausibly prudish as the old myth about Victorian piano leg covers. Worrying that your kids will be corrupted by the lyric I wanna rock and roll all night and party every day seems absurd looking back from a post-"Smell Yo Dick" world.

Without so much as a "click here to confirm that you're 18," kids today have free access to porn, violence, and even some naughty words. As of yet, they don't appear to be fucking and fighting their way across the U.S. like Road Warrior Babies. Will the next generation be different from the previous one? Sure! One would hope so, right? Will their problems be objectively worse than those of their parents'? I haven't seen any data to support that, and I read parts of three different Wikipedia entries for this article. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to make some tiny tire armor for a movie idea I just had.

People feared train travel would literally destroy our children's futures. The belief was that women's bodies simply could not handle being accelerated to 50 miles per hour. They thought that achieving this unprecedented speed would cause a woman's uterus to fly right out of her body. The basis for this fear was, of course, the fact that ... well ... science? I guess it was that ladies are delicate, so the most lady part of the lady must be the most delicate part?

Though no bodies disintegrated, trains did cause catastrophes. They were just boring, predictable catastrophes like people getting crushed to death (something everyone in the 1800s would have been very familiar with) or, at worst, the movie Snowpiercer. Women's uteri did not fly out the moment they reached 50 miles per hour, like some kind of Troma-made Back To The Future III. Unsurprisingly, the prediction based on nothing but irrational fear of the unknown did not come to pass.

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Though, to be fair, these cars were pelted off by dislodged wombs.

And that's kind of the deal with all of these, right? Fear of the unknown. Fear of change. Fear of a flying uterus.

To me, the take-home message of these examples isn't that all change is good or that there's never cause to be alarmed. I'd say the Cuban Missile Crisis deserved a good deal of "holy shitting," for example. And it seems like global climate change is something that could make our lives objectively suck. I'm just advocating a healthy dose of skepticism when articles insinuate we're all headed for Sodom and Gomorrah because Lemonade teaches kids these days to firebomb cancer research centers. Maybe I'm preaching to the converted, advocating skepticism on Cracked. If I am, please remember: Telephones were built by Satan to rot our brains and intercept your hot goss. Amen.

Aaron Kheifets is an occasionally mustachioed comedian, writer, and director. You are allowed to follow him on Twitter, watch his videos, and look at his website.

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