Saturday, September 24

Act Your Age


Violence, sex, and bullying. They have been around for a long time. They were present when I was in high school decades ago but certainly not on the scale of today. What happened? Every time a kid commits suicide, shoots up a school or underage girl gets pregnant - everyone is alarmed, shocked and stunned at their occurrence. When such behavior occurs among adults there’s hardly a shrug. What’s the difference?

There are lots of simple reasons that combine to create a complex problem that needs to be untangled to be  addressed. First of all we have to stop referring to teenagers as children. They are still maturing physically, neurologically and emotionally but they are not children. They should accurately be called adolescents; a mid stage between child and adult. Full maturity is a slippery thing so 18 has been fixed as the magic number for legal  adult hood but it’s not. From the adults point of view they are still small children; innocent, vulnerable against the adult world. From the adolescent point of view they believe they are old enough to navigate that world. Teens engage in play acting in order to figure out how to be  adults.

An adult gets angry, gets a gun and goes postal at work. An adolescent takes a gun to school and shoots all the mean people. They learned that from adults. Sex is forbidden - so they do it. Since getting pregnant is grounds for entering adulthood without permission they engage in anal and oral sex to a degree that shocks the clueless adults. A teenager is bullied relentlessly at school and adults do little or nothing to stop it. They see the hazing as a rite of passage - It’s supposed to toughen you. Then everyone steps back in surprise when the adolescent commits suicide. Maybe they were too soft everyone wonders and therefor failed the test. After all school are designed to be microcosms of society. (schools as factories, producing factory workers).

The willful ignorance of adults and the deliberate hiding of adolescents of what’s going on here has created a dangerous disconnect between the two. Adolescents want desperately to be grown ups and adults desperately want them to remain in a romanticized childhood. The big difference is that with age, one develops the emotional tools to deal with bullies, the complex nature of sexuality and an understanding that violence is an act of last resort.

The infantilization of adults has resulted in their being increasingly unable to deal with real issues while the same complexity of modern society is placing demands of earlier maturity on adolescents.

Some ideas to change this will be offered in part 2. Feel free to offer your own thoughts.

Thursday, September 15

Quote of the Day


Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding it’s way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’ .”  Isaac Asimov

Sunday, September 11

How to Be a Karma Groupie



I was sitting out in the back yard soaking my feet in cool water while sipping lemonade and gin. I was thinking as I tend to do; what is the meaning of life ? I had a epiphany I want to share.

Whatever you do in life, do it for the right reasons, that means help another soul and leave the world a better place. That’s doesn’t mean what’s in it for me? How do I make the most money from it and how do I win the game? It means you do it because the golden rule is the ONLY rule: treat others as you want to be treated.

If you do something and you lose money, recognition and maybe even friends /allies don’t worry cause the other universal rule kicks in; what goes around comes around. You can either get a major bitch slap from the universe or a loving embrace depending on your motives. Bernie Madhoff robbed from everyone and he’s sitting in prison. Eckert Tolle gained satori and sat blissfully homeless on a park bench. Now he shares his enlightenment with everyone. Pick your destiny.

If you change one life- you did the right thing. If you make the world a better place for others to live  in- you did the right thing.

Do the right thing and generate some good karma.

Friday, September 9

Held hostage by Technology

I was reading about the big power outage in the southwest and several things come to mind. One, how did a minor error cause this huge cascade effect? Seems our energy grid is far more fragile and prone to failure than we realize. Second, after reading the litany of things that failed and the scrambling it caused, it's humbling and distressing to realize how dependent we are on technology to power our world. Imagine going a single day without using any electrical  power. Third, consider this a another dry run for disaster preparedness. The not so fierce Hurricane Irene may have caused some over reaction but better safe than sorry and we learned how quickly people can evacuate when needed to.

Since this seems to be the season for catastrophes -next up earthquakes. Get your emergency kit together, make a plan if family gets separated and be ready for anything.

Thursday, September 8

Hot August Nights

I'm back to blogging again. The period of slugginess has left me and I'm ready to annoy, inform and/or amuse you dear readers.

Summer took it's sweet time arriving but when it did, oh boy. I was surprised we made it above 90 degrees. Now I'm surprised I haven't been reduced to a pile of melted fat. I suspect that summer will leave as quickly as it came but in the mean time it's nights sleeping in the tea house and sipping gin lemonade to kept cool.