A Societal Case of Teen Angst

For large swaths of my life, the camera has not been kind to me.  Then again, it could have something to do with my fashion "sense."  Consider the photo on the left.  I'm the boyish one in the middle, all denim and swag.  Really, my only saving grace was that I was a teen and didn't know any better.

. . . kind of like our country right now.

Countries, like dogs, age differently than humans.  If I double the typical dog-to-human equation, then it takes 15 years of being a country to equal one year of human life.  That means the United States is knee deep in adolescence.  Heck, using that equation, we've only been able to drive for a little over a year and we still can't vote.

Hyped up on testosterone, its brain not fully formed, the United States is the wild-eyed teen driving too fast, staying up too late,  eating too poorly, blindly fighting itself and others for reasons both real and imagined.  Acned and ill-proportioned, our country's youth looks strange on us.

Like many teens, the United States is angsty and adrift, hungry to find its identity and certain that it's older than it really is.  Our elders--China, Japan, Ethiopia and Egypt, as well as much of Europe--have every right to roll their eyes at us.  They, who have known foreign wars on their own soil, they who have lurched and belched and stretched and grieved through millennia, must think us fools at times.

Not all is lost in this adolescence, though.  It is there, in those youthful days, after all, where wild, hope-filled dreams take root and our eyes and minds begin to imagine a tomorrow that is somehow different.  Something that is not. . . this.  

Fortunately, we are all experts at this, having survived our own adolescence.  Surely, then, we can figure out a way to work together and nudge our country through these rough years, remembering always that what we feed is what will grow.

Below the too-loud music is a deep river, a thrum that suggests real change. We would do well to heed its call.