I Won't Grow Up!

I won't grow up

I don't want to wear a tie

And a serious expression

Not even gonna try

Peter Pan

On a routine trip to the mall or a sporting event, look around. Ball cap, turned backwards. Inappropriate T-shirt. Jostling for position at the video game display or fist fights over a disputed call at the ball game. Rows of screaming fans at a rock concert. Note scantily clad females with belly button piercings and tattoos that are visible and indiscreet. Whoops. There goes said female, right into the mosh pit.

Those teenagers today! Right? Wrong. Adults. Fathers in America used to have sons. Now they have mini-me. Mothers used to have daughters who wanted to grow up so they could be just like Mom. Now the Mother's want to be just like their daughters. Pop and his offspring head out to the ball field dressed in the same outfits: baggy shorts, flip flops, athletic socks and T-shirt, topped by a baseball cap. Mothers and daughters head to the mall, shop at the same stores, go to the same movies and talk about the same things. One is older and bigger, the other smaller and younger, but their tastes overlap to a remarkable degree. Today, the child truly is father to the man and mother to the woman.

Diana West, columnist for The Washington Post, has written a fascinating book, The Death of the American Grown-up. It is more than just baseball caps, rock and roll, blue jeans and four-letter words. Narcissistic baby boomers, she writes, have methodically reversed the maturation process, destroyed parental authority and subverted traditional values.

Once upon a time, in the not too distant past, childhood was a phase, adolescence did not exist, and adulthood was the fulfillment of youth's promise. No more. Where have all the grown-ups gone? And, why is the world without grown-ups such a dangerous place?

We are all familiar with Baby Britneys, Moms Who Mosh, and Dads too young to call themselves mister. This phenomenon seems shaped by a social bias against maturity. Not growing up is still relatively new -- to our cultural and political behaviors as a people and as a nation. We are a society of perpetual adolescents who can't say "no"; West argues that during the so-called culture wars, we sophomorically retreated from the lessons of Western civilization. Americans now find themselves without an understanding of own identity -- or our enemy's.

From the rise of rock and roll to the rise of multiculturalism, from the loss of identity to the discovery of diversity, from the emasculation of the heroic ideal to the PC-ing of Mary Poppins, The Death of the Grown-up makes the case that it is our own childishness that is our greatest weakness as we confront jihadist Islam in a mixed-up post-9/11 world, arguing that there is something about our past that we might better appreciate -- not just to enhance our future, but to help us survive.

The gist of it is this: In a now-vanished age, parents knew the difference between right and wrong and taught it to their children. For reasons that might have been fascinating to explore, the same generation that fought World War II, the Greatest Generation, rejected this role, raising children more interested in self-gratification and creating their own culture of music and clothes than in emulating their parents.

West argues, The common compass of the past, that urge to grow up and into long pants; to be old enough to dance at the ball; to assume our rights and responsibilitie, all completely disappeared. Rudderless, the baby boomers developed a values-free, nonjudgmental world view that reached fruition in multiculturalism, a debilitating condition that has left the West virtually powerless to argue for its own interests, to recognize and denounce evil or to resist aggression.

Author Lionel Trilling notes the complete eradication of the notion of making a life with a beginning, middle and end. This aspiration has disappeared. It used to be a reflexive action to reject your growing years. People were expected to grow out of adolescence and lose certain traits such as the self-absorption, lack of identity and that striving of a young person to find himself. We as a society no longer expect to find ourselves, it has become an open-ended process

One of the things we all enjoy about childhood is getting lost in the world of pretend. But such flights of fancy are not supposed to govern us as adults in both raising our own children and in the larger picture of formulating a geo-political strategy.

I was at church Sunday and watched with pleasure as a young couple stood before the congregation and baptized their newborn. This young Father is a 3rd grade teacher in a Muskogee School. He wears a tie every day in the classroom. Why? Because he wants to impress on his students that he is a professional, that he takes his job seriously, and that he is a grown-up. Something we all should aspire to.
.