Fravia's Messageboard ~ Moderated again...
Friday, 11-Jun-1999 04:16:53

The Boys and the Bees: The shootings are one more argument for
abolishing adolescence

" . . . . Our deeper trouble should be sought at sources that lie
upriver, a generation in the past. Abolish adolescence? We should
have thought of that 30 or 35 years ago and terminated what became the
prolonged adolescence of the baby boomers. The grownups in charge in
the 60s lost control of American society. The moral center of gravity
shifted from middle aged authority to youthful impulse. So did the
commercial center of gravity: the boomers were a gold mine. Now we
live in an enduring vacuum of grownups, taken from us in the way that
blight obliterated the American elm.

"We struggle, wistfully, to re-create some vanished adult faculty of
judgment, remembering bits and pieces of commonplace old wisdom as we
go (insights such as this: maybe kids need supervision). Robert Bly
had it right: "Adults regress toward adolescence; and adolescents --
seeing that -- have no desire to become adults." We defined adulthood
down. . . ."

-- Lance Morrow


kuririn