Baby Teeth

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The world is growing up.

Living has a way of creating a set of expectations.

When you are a child, you think you will have your teeth forever.

Then one day one of them comes loose and soon they are all falling out.

Your expectation did not match Reality.

Most of us believe in the stories told by those in authority over us individually in our early years our parents, our caretakers tell us.

These stories we naturally believe to be true.

Why would our parents lie to us?

An example is someday you will have a job.

Most of us get some level of education, and from there, we make choices and pursue a career.

Life sometimes throws us a curve ball, and instead of a career with a 9 to 5 job, we get an hourly wage at a fast food joint.

When, we were told we would grow up to have a career, and we dreamed what that career would be the difference between Reality and our dream can be strikingly different can it not?

Right now, you and I are living in a time of change.

We are witness to what I'm calling a clash of expectations.

Each of us expected our lives and the world to work one way only to be confronted with something very different.

That difference is Reality.

This clash of expectations today occurs because we for the first time in history can have the truth as well as lies delivered into our hands and into our minds instantly.

Steve Jobs wanted to put the power of the computer into everyone's hands.

He saw it as a way of incorporating, of blending together, of merging the human race in a specific manner to embrace the harmony of humanity through knowledge.

He helped usher in the communication age.

People like Buckminster Fuller saw that the desktop computer was going to be the most revolutionary power to pull all aspects of humanity onto a critical path of knowledge.

For the very first time in human history, humanity would be able to know information instantly.

Unfiltered.

Joseph Campbell, on the other hand, saw a canyon opening up in humanity's future.

As Arthur C. Clarke put it, humanity was coming to its own childhood's end.

It was going to lose its baby teeth.

Campbell rightly witnessed the end of humanity's transitional traditions.

When I was a child, I thought like a child, and when I became an adult, I thought as an adult.

Childish things are to be put away when we become adults.

Campbell saw that the world over had lost those cultural traditions which told the child previously that now you are no longer a child, now you are an adult.

Our modern society…

As the adult, you are responsible for the common good of the whole.

Children conversely are only concerned with their own happiness, their own welfare, and are selfish.

Previously in the West, this time of transition from childhood to adulthood was called the age of responsibility.

When a person reached the age of eight or thereabouts, the child was recognized by the adults in the community as being able to understand the difference between right and wrong.

Being aware of that difference meant they could be held responsible for their actions not only for themselves but for the community.

They realized Joe was old enough to trust that he could take the cows down to the river for a drink and not leave them there to go off and play.

Responsibility…

The individual left behind their childhood and took on the role of the adult to support and defend the common good.

Our modern society has allowed that tenant of humanity, what it means to be a human and an adult to drift away, much like Wilson the soccer ball did in the film Castaway.

Today we allow 40-year-old grown children to act out in public precisely as if they were toddlers.

Somehow collectively, we are afraid to tell these adults to put away their toys, clean up their rooms, and behave like an adult.

There is obviously a whole host of issues that these childish expectations from these immature adults can come into conflict with Reality.

I deserve a trophy!

I will marry Prince Charming!

I will have the perfect career!

I'm always right, you're always wrong!

You can't make me!

I'm winning you're not!

I'm better than you!

It's mine!

Children.

Children.

The Child/Adult can resist growing and being responsible for more than just their selfish interests well into their 80's.

However, one day, they will have to face Reality.

The truth.

We only get one chance at life, and sitting at the children's table living as a petulant child tyrant is a sad existence.

A sad existence for the child and the parents.

In America today, we find many people who we have previously elected to Office that demonstrate that they are still children.

These representatives of ours whine, they stomp their feet, they cry out, these Senators are throwing a tantrum because they refuse to do the chore that they were sent to elected Office to do.

Their expectations of power and prestige as a member of a representational government has come into conflict with the Reality of which is more critical their self-interests or the Constitution?

They resent that they must serve the Constitution and not solely themselves.

The Constitution which is written for We the people, not I the indulged child/adult.

At the head of our government currently sits a particular kind of a spoiled brat.

Indulged throughout his life, never told he was wrong by those that served his father, he believes himself to be his own law, his own justice, his own judge.

He has an expectation that his world cannot be challenged.

It's time that the adults in the room introduce this child President to Reality.

It's time to give him a time out.

Peace

DFrey