"You'll get it when you become an adult"
This is probably one of the phrases that annoyed me the most when I was young. As a child or a teenager, you are in that constant state in which you think you own the knowledge of the wise people and that you have the power to change the entire world, but that other people keep dragging you back.
One of these days, after I finished reading a book (probably one about the Afghan Warfare), I was thinking about morality and consequences of military action within a political scenario and it dawned on me that damn, I am an adult now, aren't I?
Whenever someone dropped the "you'll get it when you become an adult" bomb, I used to roll my eyes while thinking "they totally don't get it. I'm mature enough to understand that, I don't need to be treated like a child" (that I actually was). A couple of decades later, I'm finally starting to understand the meaning of all this.
I can see this quite clearly when I see my 10-year old cousins playing Call of Duty games.
"Mom won't let me play this game because it's for people older than 12."
My cousins spent one of their nights at our home on their vacation. One at a time, so that we could give them proper attention. One of them was happy enough to play LEGO Batman. We let the other one play Call of Duty, he just loves military shooters. Then, he said something that really caught my attention:
"I totally want to kill that other soldier!"
or something along these lines.
This might have been the moment in which I started to grasp the meaning of the sentence my parents (and every single person who is older than me) kept saying ever since I became self-conscious of my own existence. It dawned on me that my cousins didn't have the slightest idea of what it meant to kill another human being and the implications of this. And why should they? They are barely old enough to understand the concept of death and the many difficulties an adult person must face.
Sometimes when I'm having conversations with them, I start questioning myself about how much of an old lady I must sound to them. I could explain to them why killing is a bad thing, why police officers don't shoot thieves, why we have to pay taxes. But how much of what I say would interest them?
As an adult, I now understand several of the things I wasn't able to understand as a child because I have been through a lot of things. I understand that police offices are not allowed to randomly shoot thieves because there are laws to which they must abide. I understand that soldiers cannot kill terrorists because there are international treaties. I understand that you cannot kill another person because there are moral implications: the life of another person is not yours to decide to end it, regardless of how much you may want to or if you think it is fair or not. And so on, so forth. Of course, there are tons of other controversial subjects, but my point here is that you won't get to understand these points of view until you've been through enough of them to the point where you start seeing them under another perspective.
Perhaps if I had been told that when I was younger, I would have thought about a lot of things quite differently.
One of these days, after I finished reading a book (probably one about the Afghan Warfare), I was thinking about morality and consequences of military action within a political scenario and it dawned on me that damn, I am an adult now, aren't I?
Whenever someone dropped the "you'll get it when you become an adult" bomb, I used to roll my eyes while thinking "they totally don't get it. I'm mature enough to understand that, I don't need to be treated like a child" (that I actually was). A couple of decades later, I'm finally starting to understand the meaning of all this.
I can see this quite clearly when I see my 10-year old cousins playing Call of Duty games.
"Mom won't let me play this game because it's for people older than 12."
My cousins spent one of their nights at our home on their vacation. One at a time, so that we could give them proper attention. One of them was happy enough to play LEGO Batman. We let the other one play Call of Duty, he just loves military shooters. Then, he said something that really caught my attention:
"I totally want to kill that other soldier!"
or something along these lines.
This might have been the moment in which I started to grasp the meaning of the sentence my parents (and every single person who is older than me) kept saying ever since I became self-conscious of my own existence. It dawned on me that my cousins didn't have the slightest idea of what it meant to kill another human being and the implications of this. And why should they? They are barely old enough to understand the concept of death and the many difficulties an adult person must face.
Sometimes when I'm having conversations with them, I start questioning myself about how much of an old lady I must sound to them. I could explain to them why killing is a bad thing, why police officers don't shoot thieves, why we have to pay taxes. But how much of what I say would interest them?
As an adult, I now understand several of the things I wasn't able to understand as a child because I have been through a lot of things. I understand that police offices are not allowed to randomly shoot thieves because there are laws to which they must abide. I understand that soldiers cannot kill terrorists because there are international treaties. I understand that you cannot kill another person because there are moral implications: the life of another person is not yours to decide to end it, regardless of how much you may want to or if you think it is fair or not. And so on, so forth. Of course, there are tons of other controversial subjects, but my point here is that you won't get to understand these points of view until you've been through enough of them to the point where you start seeing them under another perspective.
Perhaps if I had been told that when I was younger, I would have thought about a lot of things quite differently.