"Some people never grow up." As often as we hear that repeated, I doubt that most people give it any real thought. When we watch TV shows like "Bert the Conqueror" we are amused—to some degree or other—at the ways in which people don't grow up, but again, we merely assume that it's just for our amusement. After all, a little fun is good for us, isn't it?
Yes, fun is a part of having complex human feelings in a scary world. Without the "escape" of humor, for example, we'd all probably go nuts. But there's a sinister side to this, as well. It has less to do with the fact that we try to relive parts of our lives that were pleasant than it does with how we spent those times in the first place. Childhood is probably the most important part of that. In a very real sense, our world today is—and always has been—driven by our childhoods. Look around you. Especially, look around you at work. Our families, workplaces, and governments (not to mention religions) are run by adults who are really still acting as children, because they are still using the lessons learned as children by other: peers, elders, role models, hero figures, you name it. When you begin to study it, this aspect is actually pretty frightening. As children, we learn about honor and shame, about winning and losing, about good and bad, about "us and them", and a host of other things. We learn our prejudices there as well. We see movies with violence (and especially with violence as the proper means to address injustice), play violent games: playing games that enforce gender roles and expectations, and such as that. In Sunday School (or other such religious education settings) we also learn the stories that later make no sense, that are truly black-and-white, devoid of human nuance, that reinforce the belief in miracle over mystery (I've written about that earlier). We teach our children patriotism and that war can be "good," and that we (that is, those on "Our Side") have many enemies that are "bad."
There are, often, positive things that we teach our children, but it's vital to pay attention to the negative, divisive, judgmentalizing lessons as well. Patriotism and war are a good example. If you ask foot soldiers of WWII about their experiences, sometimes you find that the hopeful youth went off to wage war against a bunch of evil foreigners, only to find that childhood fantasies lasted minutes at most when fear and death became all too real. Some actually say that they aged many years in many minutes in the heat of battle. And yet we still speak of valor, honor, duty, and patriotism as though they mean the same things to us as adults as they do to little children. If we do actually grow up, we find our black and white world full of gray. If those in power want to influence us, they have to make things black-and-white again by supplying enemies and fostering distrust and hatred, just as we experienced as children. And, because we learned such things as children, we follow them. And, because they need to have power over us, the enemies are defined as the cause of many problems, and often to great effect. Our world sinks into the abyss just a little bit more… We are, it would seem, at the mercy of children wielding great power and influence. It is as though, now as adults, they are turning the world on its axis opposite to the direction it really must turn. What we learn as children helps it move backwards, toward the very things we know are wrong, counterproductive, and just plain evil.
But most of us know children, and we can teach them positive lessons that will, at the very least, I hope, confuse them, offering alternative views that might just take root over the years and begin to slow our backwards turning toward our own self-made doom. If we keep it up…and if we all try to take part in it, what we learn as children will not have to be what we escape "to" to avoid the problems of this world. We can live there all our lives just as happily…as children.
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