Commence Addressing

Charter Oak-Ute NEWSpaper — Schleswig Leader, Thursday, May 17, 2007 – Page 3

Here’s a sensitive subject that I’d like to address, commencement.

Commencement is supposed to be a ceremony after which people who have just become former high school seniors commence with the rest of their lives, sometimes known as adulthood.

Really, it’s a ceremony after which these adolescents who are convinced that they are no longer children, have to be coerced by their mammas to commence addressing a stack of thank-yous for all the cards and money and stuff that people gave them as a reward for somehow surviving high school.

Commencement remains a rite of passage for young people in a time when rites of passage pass sooner then they used to because kids think that they somehow have a right to their rites of passage earlier.

Kids these days start drinking and smoking and “experimenting” with sex and drugs in junior high. Remember when kids used to “experiment” with smoking in junior high and drinking in high school and “discovered” sex in college? Remember when people who used drugs generally dropped out of college, and “discovered” that life was pretty hard when you couldn’t hold down a decent job?

Some of us “experimented” with smoking and “discovered” drinking in college. We’re the same squares who experimented with cussing in junior high and keep hoping to rediscover sex after years of marriage. Today, kids are cussing and fighting, dating, and threatening laws suits, in early elementary school.

Which begs some questions; when does adolescence commence, and when does it end? When does adulthood commence? With so few rites of passage left to pass through at the end of what we used to quaintly consider childhood, what exactly does it mean to be an adult anyway?
What got me thinking about this is that Ellen, my five year old up and asked me one day, “Daddy, inside your brain, do you sometimes think you’re still a kid? Like, are you the same person inside your brain as you were you were when you were a little kid, like MY age?”

Honestly? I didn’t want to tell her that inside I wish I didn’t have work and responsibility and bills and all the pressure and expectations that we adults all have. All I want to have to do is watch Saturday morning cartoons and eat breakfast cereal. But I didn’t tell her that. I don’t really know what I told her, some grown-uppy thing about how you’re always the same person inside, you just grow and get smarter and more mature and blah blah blah.

One of the ways to know you’re an adult is if you recognize that the behavior of other adults is hopelessly adolescent. Like politicians, musicians, professional athletes, celebrities of both the big and small screens calling people names, lying, cheating, stealing, gossiping, arguing, flaunting their toys and clothes, throwing tantrums when they don’t get their own way or paying hundreds of dollars for a haircut.

But you REALLY know you’re an adult when you feel it’s important (even if it’s nearly impossible) to try to explain to your children WHY the things those supposed adults are doing are so inappropriate, hurtful, self-destructive, or just plain immature.

I know that in some ways the class of 2007 is a lot more worldly and road-worn than most that have gone before them. The September 11 attacks happened when they were in seventh grade, we invaded Iraq when they were in eighth grade. But let’s hope that the rest of they’re life lessons don’t have to be so hard-learned.
Let the commencements commence!