This may take a while to unfold as children are like the most convoluted rose or origami figure one can imagine. Keep in mind also that I write pretty much off the cuff; but usuallly about stuff that's been percolating quite a while.
I love to visit The Onion from time to time--amidst all the usual perversities there are some useful ideas and even verities. What struck me most memorably was a skit some time ago in which an Onion reporter purportedly found two of the last living adults in America. I don't recall any of the details; but it suddenly struck me that there are really NO adults living on the planet even now. And no writer who can even define what one might look like.
Personhood, as I said in my previous blog,(bassocontinuo), is a given; it's a gift; a personality is whatever traits inher in a particular individual. Some aspects can be seen right away; like my ornery nature. Others take years to develop--and some aspects we hide so well that no one sees them. Even sometimes ourselves.
Recently I read in Sports Illustrated about Walter Payton and the kind of hell he put his wife through; not as badly as a certain golf personality, but it only takes one to hit it, as they say in baseball. I'd like to believe he accepted the forgiveness that was always there when Mike Singletary visited him in the last month. But I can never assume.
By some odd coincidence (ha!) I also pulled down "Anna Karenina" off the top shelf where it has been lingering or languishing for decades beside "War and Peace". It appears that the theme is exactly the same--a faithful wife used and abused in this case by a "well-liked" hypocrite named Oblonsky.
Does this kind of disloyal, backstabbing, vicious behavior strike anyone as it does me--nauseating.? I'm no longer sure I'll get through this book--for one thing Tolstoy may not have been an adulterer, but like his admirer Ghandi, he treated his wife with less dignity than most dogs receive.
.
What's the point? And how does that relate to children? (As if that were not obvious enough)
It's quite easy to define adultery. Not so with adulthood. Adultery is cruel thoughtless child's play for sexually advanced adolescents, which is far more indulgent than I really mean to be.
A Calvin and Hobbes masterpiece has Calvin reading the movie ads out loud: "Adult situations. What's that supposed to mean?" Hobbes replies, "I suppose it has to do with paying bills, doing laundry, and stuff like that." Calvin: "It's a wonder anybody goes to these!"
My point exactly. No one would go. And that's because there are no adults--it's like "The Lord of the Flies" writ large, complete with the oxymoronic "rescue destroyers".
The Bible purposely and realistically captions all of us as children of one sort or another. At no point that I can recall does Jesus ever say to anyone, as we often do is exasperation, "Oh, grow up!" "And a wise child will say under his breath, "Never!)
To be continued.
Good one. Bill has his groove back....lol
ReplyDelete