Remember When You Were Fourteen

Happy New year and welcome to the bottom of the cliff. More later on this.


It has been a really long time since I was fourteen years old. Back then there was TV, but there were only three channels from the three major networks. Movies and TV were heavily censored then. There was no Playboy magazine. No hot video games. No computers. It was boring by today's standards.

There was still mischief to be done and evil thoughts in the vile minds of fourteen year old boys. If you don't believe me, ask those that were fourteen year old girls in that era. The point being, that boys that age have very strange thought processes and find very odd things to be funny. An accidental gaseous emission in a class room was enough to throw every young male in the class into a ten minute uncontrolled fit of snickering.

It is so much worse now. Between "adult" cartoons and standards going from low to no, young boys sometimes spend the period from their eleventh to their sixteenth birthdays in a fit of giggling hysterics.

Society has learned to accept this from young lads. It's a hormonal thing. They  can't help it. Parents just try to calm them long enough to do homework and hope that they ultimately learn something, pass out of this phase, and go on from there.

But I have observed a new phenomena recently. I try to spend some time watching news shows on TV every day. I have seen, of late, a number of "on the street" interviews of "average" people. Generally the interviews are about current events or cultural happenings. I know that these shows are edited to keep it interesting and make the news fun. But so many of the people that they talk to are silly, smirky, and totally unaware of the more serious things in the world around them. And this applies to both male and female. It appears that a large segment of the young adult population is stuck on fourteen.

The conservative voting population and the liberal voting population pretty much balance each other out. When the left leaning and the right leaning segments of independent voters are added into the mix, we are left with about ten percent of the population that decides who runs the country. That might just mean that our beloved country is under the control of those that are stuck on fourteen. That explains so much!