When I Was a Child…
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” (King James Version, 1 Corinthians 13:11)
Today, in America, we are addicted to youth. Far worse today than it was during the 1960s and ’70s of the Baby Boom era, grown men (and women) act as though they were 15–30 years younger than they actually are. What’s wrong with this picture?
Addicted to cell-phones, video games, and all kinds of technology, we forget that first and foremost we are human beings, inherently social creatures who need human-to-human interaction from birth to death in order to properly fulfill our purpose as a species. We largely avoid conversations in subways or trains, crowds, and other social settings. Imagine: going to a night club and three-fourths of the people are on their cell phones while dancing. Imagine: going to a restaurant as a family, and all four people are seated at the table, cell phones in hand, with nary a word exchanged between or among them. Imagine: going to a movie theatre, and having to be reminded to turn off your cell phone.
Then, instead of going on physically-challenging vacations, more and more people give up two weeks at work, in front of a computer, to stay at/near home, in front of a PlayStation or Xbox. Instead of talking about the federal government shutdown, or the crazy politics of the day, they debate the merits of Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto. Hell, even in Amish country and in the rural outskirts of Montana these arguments are going on.
Advertising — one of my major peeves — is responsible for this colossal wreckage in our culture. There was a time when we generally recognized that life was full of cycles: infancy; childhood; adolescence; young adulthood; mature adulthood; and old age. Each stage had its characteristic age range and behavior patterns. As we grew older, we generally recognized the value in each age and acted accordingly. In old age, many of us returned to our earliest experiences and feelings, our “second childhood,” and eventually passed away.
But, in the quest for the Almighty Dollar, companies wanted to obtain more and more revenue for longer periods of time. What did they do? They turned to advertising. As I call them, the Hucksters used to sell us on products by playing on our instinctive drive towards sex (“buy this car, fellas, and you’ll take that lovely blonde on the hood to bed!”). Not that sex is passé, but in addition to the drive to procreate they also latched on to the drive to avoid death as long as possible. What better way to do that than to play games? And with the power of the PC and gaming consoles over the last 30+ years, a mass industry has arisen, promoting “Youth At All Costs.” Hence, the video gaming phenomenon has taken on a life of its own, with the same bells and whistles that cater to the addictive centers in the brain, just like slot machines do.
More than the display of electronic images on TVs, consoles, smartphones, and virtual reality screens, our youth obsession has devolved into the comic book movie universe. Superman, Batman, the Justice League, the Marvel characters, all would be fine on the TVs of the 1950s through the 1970s, but they really took off, appealing to the rebel slackers aka Generation X, in the late 1980s and continuing to this day.
For those who read books without pictures, this extraordinary attachment to comic book movies is nothing short of appalling. Nowadays, going to a movie theater seems like a trip to the Fountain of Youth, where people in their 30s and above apparently relive their childhood experiences and feelings. Perhaps our fetish on youth and its corresponding lack of a moral center will lead to a kind of society-wide Picture of Dorian Gray, where our ethical shortcomings will be reflected in the horrifying, corrupt image we portray to the world, while we pursue our libertine passions, unburdened by conscience or sense of virtue.
There are some members of the “geriatric kindergarten” in Congress who tell the youngsters, e.g., Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to “wait your turn,” and “learn to go along so you can get along.” What the Ensure Generation fails to understand is that people such as AOC are, in fact, raising concerns that need to be addressed as quickly as possible, and not ignored by the comic-book crowd: global climate-change; economic and social injustice; health care; housing; education; immigration; gun-control; our trade and foreign relations policies; and our crumbling infrastructure, among others.
The actions and motivations of AOC and those of her ilk in and out of Congress suggest that we haven’t been completely taken over by the Youth über Alles set, but they are a relatively rare breed in our society. These are people operating with youthful energy but motivated by mature understandings of their mandate: working hard to make this a better society and a better world. They are not having heated discussions about Thanos and Dr. Strange in the next movie.
In his 1985 work, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, Professor Neil Postman examined the socio-political trends over the previous 40 years, and compared George Orwell’s 1984 with Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. In 1984, Orwell posited the loss of our rights by a totalitarian takeover. In contrast, in Brave New World, people medicated themselves, voluntarily giving up their rights for the sake of bliss.
Dr. Postman concluded that we fit within the mould of Brave New World because of our addiction to television, which was our form of soma, the self-addicting drug that had a soporific effect on us and prevented us from becoming generally and consistently active in our society.
The Baby Boomers and Gen Xers listen to Faux News and treat its Republican talking points as Gospel, rather than understanding that the phrase “Now this” artificially separates one news topic from another, as if they were watching some sort of entertainment program for those with short attention spans. The key concern is that with the shortened “info-bursts,” geared towards the mentally-young who can’t or won’t concentrate for extended periods, we are misinforming society and perpetuating ADHD among those people who most need to make mature, age-appropriate decisions for their families and society.
Too many of us avoid the need to reach out to our neighbors and communities by saying “I don’t have time for that,” but they have time for TV, or clubbing, or games, or spending all night in line waiting for the Apple store to open so they can get their next iPhone. And it was this theme in Dr. Postman’s book, which was that we now focus more and more on entertainment than on serious matters. It was and is the fact that commercial television is derivative of advertising that we now live in a collective mental swamp focused on childhood and adolescence. Reality TV and all the other vacuous advertising-based programming has led to shorter attention spans, less focus on important, age-appropriate topics, and a general decline in civility and civic discourse.
The good news, however, is that we have had such a crisis in our political leadership over the last two+ years, which has produced a substantial trend towards different and more mature leaders since last November’s mid-term election, that we have a chance to begin believing, thinking and acting more in line with our ages. The challenges we face, and the demands on our spirit, call for us to “put away childish things” and become the adults we can and should be. If we do that, we will have a chance to once again be the “city on the hill” and “a light unto the World.”
