Where the Fuck are the Adults?

Seriously.

On one level or another, we’re all children. We indulge our cruel thoughts, overreact to petty slights, buy what we can’t afford and don’t need, build our self-importance at the expense of others, let base emotion overcome empathy. Managing childish behavior, dealing with the consequences or removing it altogether, is the very essence of being an adult.

We forgive and indulge children up to a point, because they are still children. Children don’t hide their childishness, because they aren’t aware yet what it is. Desire and emotion trump consequence. Selfishness and impulse have yet to meet experience and complexity.

It’s different when an adult acts like a child, and it’s now painfully, dangerously clear that we, the adults, don’t know how to respond, most often denying that explanation altogether. An adult behaves like a child and we twist reason and logic into senseless knots trying to make adult sense of it.

There’s probably no child more frustrating, cruel, selfish, and stupid than a middle school boy.

The middle school boy is past the point where ignorance allows sympathy, but not yet developed enough that experience, empathy, and reason guide them. Often they don’t actually know yet what they did wrong, but they’ve done enough stupid and wrong things to know it happened. And so they lie, about everything, instinctively, stupidly, seconds after doing the thing they “didn’t do.” Wanting power but lacking empathy, they celebrate…