America in the Midst of a Temper Tantrum

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America, American psyche, election 2010, maturity, Politics, psychology, sociology, stupid people, wacko right wing

I keep trying to make sense out of what doesn’t make sense. That can drive you a little nutty all by itself.

Still, those of us who consider ourselves reasonably sane and mature are having a nearly impossible time with the wacko Right. We are just so tired of stoopid people. And it makes us cranky.

Imagine how the rest of the world feels. We act for all the world like the 75 IQer in a 6’5″ frame weighing  320lbs. Scary huh?

I sit in the wee hours of the night, sipping on a Merlot and ponder. And, well I think I got this figured out. A little bit anyway.

Ya see, we are by all accounts just pre-adolescents, here in the New World. I mean, sure the continent is as old as the others, but humans have not walked it until the last few tens of thousands of years, whereas in Europe at least man has skipped along the hillsides to the sound of music for hundreds of thousands of years.

Stay with me here.

Europeans, have had a loooooonggggg history to contemplate; one filled with wars, numerous transfers of power, and plagues. Death, for centuries was a near constant companion. Life was not usually all that good for most people, most of the time. As the psalmist said:

The span of our life is seventy years–eighty for those who are strong–but their whole extent is anxiety and trouble, they are over in a moment and we are gone. (Ps 90: 9-10)

Change for the better for most of the world came slowly and with great effort.

In the Americas, humans arrived by tortuous means, first across Alaska when a land bridge existed, and by some accounts parts of the western coastlands of South America were visited by great seafaring Polynesians. Whether by geography or pure bounty, there wasn’t nearly the issue of land scarcity. There was room to evade  conquerors.

When Europeans arrived upon the North American continent, they found it relatively uninhabited, and even where it was, there was enough for everyone. As the white hordes increased, Native peoples were nudged, often not gently, out the of the way.

As we started to offend each other, there was always space to move onward and Westward. And, every immigrant who arrived learned that they could remake themselves with little effort. One chose one’s field of interest and apprenticed oneself, and in a few years, one was himself a blacksmith, a printer, a lawyer. It was easy, it only took determination, time, and effort.

In other words, one could improve one’s lot in life in one’s own lifetime, whereas in Europe, even a whole lifetime might not secure much better for one’s offspring. One was limited by class, something that for a good period of American history did not exist.

In our adolescence, we succeeded at most everything. We have all the resources that were now becoming scarce in Europe, we had the will. We could create our destiny. We expected and expect to succeed, and we somehow feel most entitled to do so. We are pretty much willing to do what we need to, to gain what we wish.

In a word, we are still prepubescent. We are the kid with a decoder ring in one hand and the nuclear codes in the other. That is how the world sees us. They have right to fear us. We are indeed like a shaken bottle of champagne, ready to explode when the cork is pulled. No one knows who will get doused.

At home, it explains so much.

Virtually everyone from Washington on down through Dubya has had reason to warn the American people that this or that would take patience and TIME. We don’t hear that. Ever. We are used to instant gratification, or we still desire it, much as the babe in crib screams to be fed or changed. No explanations about “heating milk” or “going for diapers” will quell the howling. There is no logic to the babe, and there is none to us.

The GOP has learned to exploit our desire for everything NOW. When it doesn’t come, they are quick to point the finger at the “failed” policies of the Democrats. Fear that we will never get what we want if we don’t turn to them, is a powerful seduction. It works.

Europe can look at problems and see solutions that will take years to accomplish. Individual countries can unite under a banner of being oil free or having  free education through college, and work steadily for that goal, often taking a generation to attain. But they get some where.

We give our politicians about two years to give us what we claim we want. We are brats, bullies, touting our “exceptionalism” all the while being mostly unlettered and intellectual duds.We are slipping badly on almost all indices.  But we are as dangerous as any bull in a china shop always is.

We only know what we want, and that we want it now. We have no clue about the intricacies of global economics, global political realities, and global pandemic. We sit on our little cushions of superiority and glare at a world that increasingly won’t do our bidding, and we shake our fist in both defiance and warning.

And we hate, and we fear, and we are, it seems, about to do some very stupid things in about three weeks. And the world waits. . . .and too many of us it seems are too busy smoking behind the barn, to notice or care. 

Related Articles

• Eugene Robinson: These spoiled-brat voters are having quite the temper tantrum, aren’t they? (hotair.com)
• Darrell B. Nelson’s Temper Tantrum Tuesday: Jobs (grantlawrence.blogspot.com)
• Bob Cesca: Despite America’s Temper Tantrum, It’s Still a Center-Left Nation (huffingtonpost.com)

Ya See, It’s Sorta Like Gravity. . . .

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brain maturity, decision making, growing up, maturity, psychology, science, sociology

I would explain to you how I came to this topic today, but I’m afraid it might hurt your brain. Suffice it to say that it combines the active discussion from the blog post on maiden/married names, and some things I was reading in John MacQuarrie’s tome, “Principles of Christian Theology.”

The topic, if not so far obvious, is maturity. Look it up in the dictionary and you will get very little help. It’s the quality of being ripe, and fully developed. Lots of help there. What standards apply? None apparently, and my argument is that there is no standard at all.

Much like gravity, it exists, but we can’t really explain what it means, or how it comes to be. We are a bit like Potter Stewart, associate justice of the US Supreme Court commenting on pornography–“I know it when I see it.”

We take it for granted that we all know what we mean, but I submit, we all mean slightly different things. Ask a child and they will tell you, it’s the inexplicable excuse used by parents to deny them something they want to do. “You’re not mature enough to  . . . .” So it’s a fairly bad word to a kid. Ask a kid how they define maturity, and they will tell you that it has to do with age, thus to them emulating adult behavior constitutes “acting mature.”

This leads to all kinds of bad consequences from smoking, to drinking to indiscriminate sex. Kids are not the only ones who think that maturity comes with age however. We tend to push that concept as adults. “We are mature,” by definition. We may explain that last year or ten years ago, we weren’t, but nobody doesn’t think they aren’t mature NOW.

We talk about crops “maturing” and animals maturing to adulthood. Clearly we are talking about a physical concept and blending it with a psychological concept. They are not the same. And maturity is not always to be applauded since we like “baby lettuce” rather than old lettuce, but we like our wine mature.

When looking at emotional maturity, we can give attributes to it, well sort of. It in part has to do with being able to foresee long term consequences. As children we are often told that we  “don’t think ahead” and that we are “impulsive.” Adults believe that maturity is measured by being able to look down the road and see what might logically result from our choice. Kids don’t do that well.

Big problem here! Brain study shows that the human brain in terms of it’s “judgment” capabilities, doesn’t mature until the late 20’s or so. And what does that say about us? We typically allow eighteen year olds the right to engage in most adult activities except drinking. We can contract ourselves into serious debt, we can sign up to risk or lives in war, and we can take on dangerous jobs. So are we being outrageously immoral in allowing youngsters of this age to make such important decisions? Are they in fact capable of realizing the consequences of their actions?

I think we also impute to maturing a certain sense of “loss of innocence.” Mature people have lost a sense of idealism and see the world as “how it really is.” We are, we believe, more capable of making “correct” decisions because we are not hampered by childish “pie-in-the-sky” ideas about people and institutions. Children have too much “trust” in the goodness of humanity, too much optimism about the future, too little consciousness of mortality.

But in the end, this brings us no closer to defining maturity. And I would argue, it is one of those things, as I said, like gravity–clearly in existence, but no one really can put their finger on why or how. The reason? Because we all define it according to our own experiences.

If I claim to be mature today, it is because I believe that I make decisions based on the appropriate considerations. I have examined all the consequences to myself and my loved ones, and any others who might be affected. I have weighed the pros and cons.

When I look at someone else, I examine their choices and see if they fall in line with what I would likely do given the same “facts.” If so, the person is mature like me, if not, not so much. That’s pretty much it isn’t it?

On a list of things, most of us might agree on many choices as “mature.” Yet, unless the hapless person who is growing up in the world today, can memorize all these individual examples, they are left with nothing but mere platitudes explaining what is expected of them.

Which all means nothing much in the end I guess. Except that kids have a fairly legitimate gripe when they complain that they are given little in the way of direction for reaching maturity. They are given no book to read that defines it all for them, and gives them pointers on how to achieve it. We retain our allegiance to the arbitrary “age” at which time it is somehow magically dispensed upon our sleeping heads as we turn that magical eighteen, or twenty-one if you prefer.

Yet, clearly it does not, since there are mothers-in-law a plenty, who will be happy to explain the “immaturity” of said son or daughter-in-law. And plenty of spouses who moan about the lack of maturity of their other half when it comes to money or entertainment choices. So we clearly recognize that this age definer doesn’t really work.

It all comes down to the fact that there is no really good barometer here.  I’m mature enough to recognize that!

Just sayin’.

To Be or Not to be ME?

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being true to self, maturity, peer pressure, personality, psychology, self-esteem, sociology

We all struggle with the concept. It hits most of us for the first time in our teens–the pressure to conform, to be what others want and expect of us.

Somehow, we dismiss this when we leave our teens, thinking it is all behind us. But for most, I suspect it is not, and worse, for some of us, it started long before our teens.

Luckily for me, it was brought home to me once again, and I must own up to the fact that I have still not completely removed this cancer from my system. My personality is still driven to one degree or another by it.

Maturity knows no age as we all come to realize. Being who we are, being “comfortable in our own skin” is something to be striven for, and as I said, I suspect most think they are, until someone criticizes  us, and we realize that we are still held all to tight by the tendrils of wanting to be what is expected of us.

As I said, mostly we encounter this in our teen years in the form of  peer pressure. We want to be part of the crowd, and that means liking what the “crowd” likes and disliking what it doesn’t. Sometimes it causes us to do really shameful things, things we know to be wrong, merely to be accepted.

For some of us, it’s far worse than the general stupid behavior that our parents used to complain about, ending in the often heard phrase, “well would you jump off a cliff just because your friends did?” Some of it is generated by our parents themselves.

I’m not just talking about the parents who assault their kids and thus create children and later adults, who through fear, are willing to do anything to curry favor. More to the point, curry love. No, the parent who denigrates the kid, calling him stupid, ugly, fat–these esteem killing sentiments result in adults with low self esteem and they too are willing to conform to others expectations and desires in an attempt to feel wanted and, yes, loved.

I grew up in the 50’s and 60’s, and I deeply felt the pain of not being the ideal. Though I was above average in intelligence, nobody cared much about that. Beauty was still the key to success for girls. Girls were wives and mothers in the making, college was just a means to that end, hopefully nudging up the scale of income.

I was chubby and wore glasses. Not ugly, but not “cute” either. Kids made fun of me, dating was a painful and not often met hope. I was willing to do a good deal to be part of some group, and be accepted. And even there, I suspected I was thoroughly disposable, the one who if  late, would not be waited for. (I was never late as a result, and still am not).

Added to that I had dysfunctional parents, who both were good at ridicule. My brains were no big thing, expected as it were. So I was often taunted as being clumsy, stupid (in anything of importance- of which school work was not), fat, etc. My mother once exclaimed regarding my slightly buck and crooked teeth, “why you seem to have inherited all the worst qualities of both me and your dad.” (the teeth were straighted by orthodontics of course)

As a young adult, I latched on to anyone who was kind and supportive, and tried my best to be to their liking. This certainly included men, and I suspect a whole slue of women would agree with me on this. I became that which they desired. I became an enthusiast of football, or prize fighting, or interested in science fiction. I learned about muscle cars, I learned to love hiking or X-Files. It didn’t matter.  If he liked it, I liked it.

Worse for me, was always to be criticized by someone. Not just any criticism of course. If I was learning something and the criticism was clearly intended to improve my work, so much the better. But if it was of the kind, that suggested  that the person just plain didn’t like ME, well then I was deeply hurt.

Not just hurt, I was devastated. I would relate the circumstances to others–had I done anything wrong by their estimation? Was the other person being unreasonable? In most cases, I went to the person and restated my case, sure they had misunderstood. Usually they misunderstood nothing, they still reiterated the same complaint.

I couldn’t let it rest, I would grouse, replay, rethink, re-discuss, all in an attempt to rectify the situation. I couldn’t handle not being liked by someone. Usually of course, I was forced to, and often, in my younger years, this took the form of getting all my “friends” to agree with me and to avoid this person. After all, if they were my friends, they should, right?

Maturity comes of course, in realizing that we are all put together a bit differently. We don’t all like apples, we don’t all like Johnny Depp. The world would be a bore if we did. A person may need a certain type of friend. I may not be able to fulfill that need. That doesn’t mean I’m lacking, it means what it means.

For indeed, no friendship or relationship lives or dies by whether I truly like football or Mozart. Sure, we can have casual acquaitances whom we get together because we share some hobby or sport, but those who care for us, ultimately care for who we are in the deeper part of our psyche.

It’s whether we are kind, warm, loving, compassionate, empathetic, and so forth. If we are fudging on those factors to retain someone’s love, then we are but putting off the inevitable break, when they discover the truth.

Being true to self, means being who you are, even when you know it will bump up hard against the beliefs of someone you care about, or don’t care about. It in fact can’t respond to that at all. It means we are simply in all things true to who we are, letting the chips fall.

In my recent experience of feeling rejected unfairly, I started down the same path of justification and explanation. But I stopped, thanks as usual to the wise man I married. I can’t be and am not what someone else expected or wanted. So be it. I am who I am, like me or don’t.

I’m okay with that. In fact, I’m feeling pretty liberated by that. I’ve grown a bit, and I’m walking a little taller. To thine own self be true. Shakespeare would be proud! Are you  really being you?