One of the top ten all-time water-cooler discussions that I ever got into....occurred around 1998. I was still in the Air Force and had some NCO visit from another base, and we were sitting in my office where he was explaining problem X, Y and Z with a particular airman that was in his office.
In roughly six months, this young airman (probably in the age range of 19 to 20) had arrived and gotten himself into twenty-odd issues. This was a kid who'd been through basic training, done a minimum of five months in some technical training school, and spent a year at some base in the US, before arriving in Germany.
Everything had to be debated. The kid felt discipline or standards were intolerable. The kid couldn't accept directions. The kid felt the world was against him. A simple job required continual oversight.
The weight of this entire argument was that the maturity level you'd expect out of a nineteen-year-old guy, did not exist. At best, this was a 12-year-old kid pretending to be an adult. I went over five or six of the points that this guest of mine had brought up, and each readily demonstrated 'kid-like' values. This was all stuff that you would have left in the fifth-grade, and progressed onto the next three or four levels of life. Since the kid wasn't improving, my suggestion was to dump him out of the Air Force as quickly as possible.
A couple of days passed by and my guest called and said that he didn't even have a chance to discuss my advice with the Commander....the Commander had already decided to move the kid to discharge-status. It'd normally take a month or two to achieve this type of event. The Commander had the paperwork finished by the end of the 4th duty day, and the kid was put on a plane back to the US by the fifth day of decision.
I've often wondered what happened to the kid after that. He'd be approaching forty years old by this point. He's probably stocking shelves at some grocery, or cutting grass for the local city parks department.
Over the past two or three years, I've approached the attitude that there are a heck of a lot of 12-year-old kids now pretending to be older teens, college-level kids, and even adults themselves. I'd hate to assess the number but it's probably near ten-percent of the US population now that are immature and unable to act as adults.
They've lost respect. They've lost dignity. They've lost courtesy.
Some are affected by legit drug usage. Some are affected by just bad behavior. Some want to impress you with their fifth-grade logic. Some want to cite logic, while using illogic. Some want to challenge your respect by denying you any respect. And some are some great crusade for social justice....mostly heading in the opposite way, and away from actual social justice.
It's not a good society versus bad society thing. It's just that theses kids never grew up and they've still got the fifth-grade view of life. There are so many of them, that you have to interact with them at least a couple of times each week. In fact, you might have been stupid enough at some point to actually marry one of them...waking up now to realize Wanda or Micky (your spouse) is obviously a fifth-grade mentality and it's just about impossible to exit this marriage without a mess.
At some point, in my mind....something has to change. It's just the question of how you grow the 'kid' into an adult.
1 comment:
I don't know if you had this in mind or not, but you've basically described the mental state of a typical Liberal (DemocRAT). Their physical bodies may have aged beyond that of a 12 year old and have considerable years on them, but mentally, they never progressed beyond the reasoning level of one.
Unfortunately people like this can vote and they do so in ever increasing large numbers. They're easily manipulated into believing all kinds of nonsense and consequently the US ends up electing a worthless POS like the Kenyan president we had.
BTW, I'm a co-worker of your Brother just down the hallway from him.
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