Balancing Act, 1

I had an interesting chat with a friend yesterday. He was going on as he often does about how annoying he finds everyone. I have to admit that I do sympathize, being sometimes rather irritable myself, when it comes to having to field the kind of rude, selfish, moronic, antisocial and narcissistic behaviour that seems to go unchecked these days. It's like a culture of entitlement, I suppose. But, wait a minute. There's more to this, I think. I suggested to my friend that he try thinking of those people he gets annoyed over, next time, as infants. We all were at one time, you know: helpless, tiny, weak, unable to do anything but eat, shit and sleep, and cry: oops, that actually sounds a lot like some of the young adults I see on the bus every day. But seriously, I don't think many of us do adulthood all that well, and I'm not sure if anyone ever did, really, but these days, we don't have to worry so much about our basic survival needs, which does leave us a lot of spare time, energy and resources for simply being stupid. I have often observed, how much older my parent's generation appeared to be as young adults. I don't think it was just because they were my parents, and that they have always been much older than me, and always will. But people did behave differently back then, during the Depression, the War and the fifties. There was a lot more deference to authority (not necessarily a good thing), and everyone was expected to take life very seriously (ditto). The social safety nets that we now take for granted (despite their heavily eroded condition these days) simply did not exist. You left school to start working as soon as possible to help out the family and support yourself and save for marriage and starting a family which usually happened before anyone turned twenty-five. Girls were expected to keep their virginity till the wedding night and boys were allowed to experiment with prostitutes and the town "bad girl", but nothing else. In my parents' case, Mom was already five months gone with my brother en utero when she and Dad tied the knot. In city hall. She was not wearing white and there were never any wedding photos on display in the house. My mother's parents did not come out from Saskatchewan for the wedding. It was harvesting time on the farm and Mom was, well, already five months pregnant and could no longer fall back on the getting fat excuse. And this was in 1952. But everyone still dressed, acted, smoked, drank and did almost everything, like adults. It was only after the sixties that things began to change, and change happened fast and furious. We had the hippies, LSD and marijuana (legal in this country in October), space travel, the Cold War, race riots, civil and human rights marches and one of the most sweeping social revolutions of my lifetime. Everything changed and suddenly the expectations of my parents' generation no longer held for us. We dressed the way we wanted, partied, listened to psychedelic and acid rock and blues music, did tons of mind-altering drugs, and talked about revolutionary politics and overthrowing the capitalist-materialist system (but really couldn't come up with any credible substitutes, although the devil we already knew wasn't so great either). And suddenly everyone was hopping in and out of bed together. In the seventies, when I was twenty-three I was having a chat with the woman who lived downstairs with her boyfriend. She was telling me how much she owed to the sexual revolution. I replied, Uh, Susan, all that really has changed from the Sexual Revolution is this: before, if you were a good girl, you didn't. Now, if you are a good girl. You have to. Whether you want to or not. My next door neighbour (and best friend at the time), by the way, was a radical lesbian feminist, and boy did we have things to talk about. I still remember just the way she rolled her eyes when I told her about my conversation with Susan! Of course, the Sexual Revolution benefited men more than women, who were expected to not forget to take that little pill that came out in the sixties, and only now with the Me Too! movement is it really coming out in the open just how badly women have done thanks to, not only men`s piggish behaviour, but the enormous double standards that we still find ourselves negotiating. So, now, in the early twenty-first century, we have turned into superannuated kids. Adult men tend to dress like eight year old little boys, and except for their much larger size and the rather scary effects of puberty and testosterone, there aren`t really that different from little boys. Gentle Reader, if you don't find this chilling, then really, you ought to.