If the kids knew!!

As a child, I believed in an orderly universe. I believed that the centuries the human race had spent on this planet had been productive and the adults had sorted out this world and how to live in it. All our interactions with each other, what is right and wrong. It was all figured out and I just had to grow up to enter that world. Which was why I obeyed my elders - they must know what they are doing. You don't spend 25 odd years here without learning something...

Now that I've entered that adult world, I've realised that I'm just about as smart as I was at 8. Maybe a little dumber in someways. What has changed is my confidence - and self assurance and stupidity are a deadly combination. Scarily, we see this at work in too many politicians and corporate leaders. Attaining majority does not confer enlightenment....

Also, I've realised that the world we have and the systems we have were made by staggering and stumbling about for the last so many centuries. We still depend on brute force to decide rights - as kids we called this a scruffy fight, as adults we have wars. We still squabble about superiority - as kids we said 'my daddy strongest' and now we say "my religion/language/country/caste/colour strongest'. And anyone who drives on these roads knows that it is the same jostling, pushing and jumping lines that happens when you are walking - except now you do it with vehicles which could crush you. 

Watching Star Trek yesterday brought it back to me. The childish faith that we had a fool-proof adult world. In movies, things are all well planned. The challenge, the drama comes from the unexpected human error or frailty. But that actually just the opposite in this world. We have a little too much human frailty, it is order that comes as a surprise.

Perhaps we take adulthood too seriously. What we need is someone to come and smack the presidents on the head when they go to war; and say, go to your room! And no dinner till you apologise!

If I knew that the world only has overgrown kids, and just how stupid they can be, I wouldn't have taken them so seriously.