OWS: Lawless, selfish, disrespectful, and mean. They are overgrown children, in other words — not adults in any real sense of the word. It is an oddity about modern Americans that always strikes me: many seem so . . . unformed. I’ve seen pictures of my grandfather and grandmother when they were in their early 20’s (married and with 2 kids already, and another on the way) and they seemed like fully-formed adults already. They looked like adults; they dressed like adults; they behaved as adults. Yet now I see people at 30, 40, 50 years old who seem little more than self-obsessed adolescents — smug, directionless, angry but inchoate, lavishly educated but not particularly intelligent, entitled without being industrious or deserving. They even groom and dress like children: slovenly, unwashed, unbarbered, sneakers, t-shirts, sweatpants, looking like unmade beds. I look at the OWS protests and I see a crowd of ill-behaved, unsupervised toddlers, but no adults willing (or perhaps able) to call them to order. My grandparents had much more difficult lives in any way you can measure than these spoiled brats, and yet they were better people — and happier people, on the whole.
“Monty”, “DOOM: I like that Doom Doom Pow”, Ace of Spades H.Q., 2011-10-31
November 1, 2011
QotD: The unnatural prolongation of adolescence
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For even more along this line, here’s Matt Welch commenting about a particularly soft-headed article in Salon:
Comment by Nicholas — November 1, 2011 @ 14:50