“Gimilninurta conceived of a scam whereby he would rent a borrowed goat to the Mayor of Nippur in order to finance his party and somehow avoid payment.”
-The First Boxers
Every people’s history lessons are populated by Us and Them. It is thus best that those who teach history have generally omitted the meaning of the word—which is Greek for ‘inquiry’. That such a simple omission has resulted in the absence of any spirit of inquiry existing beyond the findings that ‘We’ have taken this reasonable course of action because We are ‘We’, and that They have acted unreasonably because They are They, must rank among the most effort-efficient scams since Gimilninurta funded his party at the Mayor’s expense back in 2,500 B.C..
I was recently speaking with a friend about my upcoming book ‘Why Grownups Suck’. This reminded him of that day when he discovered that there was something wrong with our chronological betters.
For me it had been watching the documentary film The World at War with my parents’ best friends, the ones that looked like Elvis and Angie Dickenson, only to have them insist, for my best interest as a child, to change the channel to something more appropriate for a boy’s education: Soul Train.
For Scott, it was also an experience had just before age 10, though it dawned in a more deliberate manner. He told me about this 10 days ago and I have not been able to get his words out of my mind. Some parts of this will be paraphrased. But since we’ve known each other for 20 years I’m confident that I can reconstruct his monologue, given in the side yard of his suburban house with his back to his tomato garden.”
“I was nine, maybe ten, when it dawned on me that the parental world was not all it was cracked up to be. It unfolded innocently enough through my limited choice of playmates. In our neighborhood in Woodlawn there were only three kids my age.
“Daryl had zero imagination, took everything literally, like a miniature adult. He could play ball with you. But forget anything imaginative. He must have been the palest kid I ever knew, red hair and extremely fair skin. Nice kid—but Scott wanted to play! Even then we knew the kid thing didn’t last forever—though perhaps Daryl did not realize this, what with his limited perspective.
“Me, I wanted to play. Heck, at forty-three I still like to play. So there’s Billy. Now Billy has all of the best toys you can imagine—it comes out and before you see the commercial running he’s got it.
[Scott rattles off a litany of vintage early eighties toys.]
“Now he would let you come over to his house and show you his toys. He would let you watch him play with his toys. But play with his toys? Forget that—not happenin’.
“Then there was Owen. Owen and I—give us a stick and a chair and we’re set for hours. For about a year and a half we were inseparable. Owen and I got along famously. It never fails to amaze me how so many parents fail to realize the impact of play…
“—So to my story about race, which is when I got hit with the concept. This was like 1981, and someone lit up a cross in the yard of this young couple that had just moved in with their small child.
[The author recalls the incident as being within a year of his move to Baltimore in September 1981.]
“Everybody was all bent out of shape about this and I just didn’t get it. We were Methodist. And the Methodist cross has this nimbus of fire around it evoking the Holy Spirit. I asked my mother if there was a religious observance going on up the street. She was beside herself. That was the first crack in the world of adults as far as I was concerned, the way she seemed so disturbed.
“So she tells me—it was a KKK burning—that ‘bad people did that’, that it was 'a bad thing'; that it was done 'because of the new neighbors.'
“And I was like, ‘why?’
And she was like, ‘Because they’re like Owen.’
“That made no sense. Owen is just a kid. Who wakes up mad at kids? Then she explains to me, ‘Because the new neighbors are black, like Owen and his folks.’
“I’m like ‘What? Owen isn’t black—tan maybe?’
“I went to my box of crayons and I pull out the black one—obviously no one is black. I then line the other crayons up from brown, to burnt sienna and on down the line. And there is Owen’s color, an off tan—ten shades off black. It was at that point in my life that I knew the adults were insane, that there was some kind of hocus pocus going on with the language. Kids know—or at least kids that are given a chance to develop their mind—when adults are pushing an agenda. That was my wakeup call. However, it’s not a call that a lot of kids can receive, because we’ve turned their minds to mush.”
Scott’s reminiscence about his childhood discovery that adults, including his compassionate parents, clung to irrational agendas, is an excellent illustration of the distrust with which I regard the various cookie cutter philosophies that our betters employ to obfuscate the facts. For in the facts repose a potential foundation for sound action; and action is the last thing our masters want from us.
Such rigid classifications of humanity according to the most extreme contrasts possible—that fly in flagrant violation of the visible evidence before our eyes—may seem nonsensical to the not-yet-mind-raped child virgin. They do, however, insure aggression of the civil, criminal and military varieties, for which, as the author, I may be thankful to bloody-handed Posterity for providing such a litany of wicked wrongs to sample between these pages.
I proceed with this book in accordance with my suspicion that most humans have been rendered delusional via their indoctrination to the point of insanity, writing it only for the benefit of the few who have somehow forgotten to take their medication. If you truly believe that the man in the White House is the color of a Ninja’s pajamas and that the majority of Americans are the same color as that house he lives in, than 40,000 Years from Home was not written for you—nor was it titled for your benefit either, as you are still squatting in the front yard wondering how you’re going to turn that tapir’s femur bone into a space shuttle...
The neighbors will surely show a bit more respect then.
We must keep in mind that the concerns and values (C&V) of the ruling class are frequently different from the C&V of those people or peoples over whom they rule. In an aristocratic society this is a given. In a democratic society, where the ruling class ostensibly governs only by the consent of the governed, it is source of friction and disappointment when the C&V of the respective groups differ.
Having said that, I agree that Adults ARE crazy. As I child I frequently observed that the C&V of the Adults frequently crossed over into irrationality. They would say illogical things like “don’t point guns at people”. But what else are guns for but to point at people? As in, “get back or I’ll shoot”, or “reach for the sky hombre“or “I arrest you in the name of the Crown”. It was clear that some of them were so hoplophobic they could not tell the difference between a real gun and a toy. Furthermore, I quickly came to understand that if you wanted to make an activity, any activity, absolutely no fun at all, just put an adult in charge of it. In fact it is my contention that you could eradicate teenage pregnancy simply by placing an adult in charge of making it happen. Particularly adults like high school athletic coaches or committees of teachers and parents; either of those groups would quickly turn sex into such an odious chore that no teen-ager would want to engage in it.
Jeremy, not only did I just reinjure a rib laughing but also stand in awe of your use of hoplophobic. Having entertained me on a morning when my eye is trying to crawl from my head and simultaneously elevated the level of discourse here to the point that I will probably lose my boxing readers in droves I am now sending you a complimentary e-book.
Have a good time Jeremy, we've earned the right to be crazy, having made it to adulthood!
Thank you very much James! I do appreciate it. With incentives like this I will certainly continue to put in my two cents from time to time.