TREATY OF PARIS HILTON

Over at Are you there, Blog?, Stephen asks on of my favourite unpleasant questions.

Why do the adults in this country continue to talk like
and live their lives as if they were all 8 year old girls
passing notes in a middle school math class?

Short answer: Because so many of us learned our social skills in junior high and never got beyond them.

Longer, and more political answer: I know that most people say that "school is where you are supposed to learn social skills," but there is no possible way an 11-year-old kid can teach another 11-year-old kid to behave like an adult. Children learn to be mature and reasonable grown-ups by being around mature and reasonable grown-ups, by seeing how they act and react to situations and then emulating them.

And society has changed so that there are fewer mature and reasonable grown-ups to go around. At first this was an unintentional negative side effect of a good thing: after WWII, mothers began to work outside the home, leaving children to fend for themselves more and more.

But after 1970, societal changes were more underhanded, more evil. After seeing how years of too much affluence, too much freedom, and too much public education turned middle class kids into campus-striking, flag-burning hippies, the conservatives got really scared. (And I'm saying "conservative" in the original meaning of the word: people with money, power, and security who are fighting to keep it).

So school standards were lowered, curricula were watered down with extracurricular fluff, and too-leftwing special interests were permitted to turn schools into social centers where it was more important to feel proud of yourself than to actually accomplish anything to feel proud of. At the same time, big business stepped up the use of advertising to turn human beings into impulse buyers who wanted their lives to look like the fantasies they see on television. In the 50s, Lucy Ricardo and Ralph Kramden had realistic money problems. In the 90s, Monica and Rachael had a great apartment and stylish clothes in New York City, even though they talked about being broke.

I'm not saying this was an organized conspiracy to wipe out the middle class. Maybe there were a few think-tank types who had these ideas (Look up Allen Greenspan's comments on how much unemployment is good and why sometime.), but for the most part it was just people making executive decisions that were best for themselves, but they were simultaneously contributing to a society where fun is king, rights are more important than responsibilities, real news has become show biz gossip, and where you're nothing if your clothes don't have the right logos on them.

So we end up with a nation where a majority of people like gossipy pre-teens because that's all they've learned. And now many of them are old enough to be parents, so they're kids will have an even harder time learning to be grown-ups.

And don't think I'm opposed to all childishness. I enjoy cutting loose as much as the next uptight, sexually repressed guy, and I'm all for "letting kids be kids" when and where it's appropriate, but they need to learn when and where that is. Wanna plaster the walls of your bedroom with pictures of your favourite American Idol contestant? Go for it. Wanna plaster your cubicle at work? No. Don't. Grow up.

And sometimes I really just want to have a little Ward Cleaver talk with the USA until it learns its lesson and then ground it until it changes its ways.

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