Some thoughts on the late teen/early adult years.

The gun control bill that passed the house proposes to raise the purchase age for firearms to 21.

Teenage soldier, i.e., me. 1982.  At that age I was plenty mature enough for this role.

The counterargument is somewhat predictable for this.  "If you can serve in the military at age 21 and carry a weapon for your country. . ."

But why can you do that at age 21?

Under the original U.S. Constitution you couldn't vote until you were 21 years of age, that being the age at which the founders deemed a man (and originally it was just men) mature enough to participate in the serious business of choosing a government.  The age was changed in the late stage of the Vietnam War, under the logic if that if you were old enough to fight for your country, you were old enough to vote and participate in the decisions that led to the fighting.  That reflected the conscription age at the time, which had reached down to 18 for most of the war, even though, as noted above, it had climbed a bit late war, and even though teenage soldiers in the Vietnam War were actually fairly rare.

All the states had militia duty requirements at the time the Constitution was enacted, as the colonies also had them prior to that and dating back to their founding. Most of these made men liable for militia service between 18 and 45 years of age.

The Federal Government didn't conscript men into military service until the Civil War, at which point it passed a bill during the war making men from age 20 to 45 years of age eligible for conscription.  The southern rebellious states passed a federal conscription provision which at first covered ages 18 to 35 and then later ages 17 to 60.  The South had a real manpower problem, it might be noted, and at the bitter end of the war, it made slaves liable for conscription, demonstrating that, because there's no reason to believe they would have made willing soldiers against their own best interest.

The draft ranges for conscription during World War was fell between age 21 and 30. The first draft range for World War Two was from 21 to 35, but as the war went on it dropped to 18 years of age and up into the 40s for the upper range.  Starting in 1948 men were eligible again for the draft at age 19.  It dropped to 18 during the Korean War and stayed there until 1969, when Nixon ordered it back up to age 19.

We lack conscription now, of course, but men between the years of 18 to 35 are liable under the Selective Service provisions to conscription and are "obligors" under the law.

Hmmmm.

Interestingly, the mid 20th Century also saw men start to graduate high school as a rule, which is also at age 18.  High school graduation rates overall, for men and women combined, rose from 6% in 1900 to 80% by 1970, near the end of the Vietnam War.  The American system of education developed such that schooling normally completed, as noted, around age 18, although some did graduate at 17 when I was a high schooler, and some at 19.  As late as the late 1930s only around half of the male population graduated from high school, but that was very rapidly changing and soon after the war most men and women graduated.

In every U.S. state you can marry, the most serious thing a person can do, and marry freely, at age 18.  While people who like to get spastic about it misconstrue it, you can marry below that with permission of your parents or authorities in most states younger than that.  18 years of age in order to contact a marriage is the global norm, interestingly, although there are some exceptions.  Honduras, for example, sets the age at 21.  Japan at 20.  The Philippines at 21.  A few nations set the minimum age for women, oddly enough, below 18, usually at 16 or 17.

The other "age of consent" is generally age 18 in the United States, although there are all sorts of other rules and factors that go into that, so it's not really safe to opine on.  What's safer to opine on is that generally in the US women become far game for male predation at age 18 and that's the age where it's generally legally safe for them to be subject to all sorts of creepy behavior.  The same is true for men, but it's women that are largely the victims in this area, although not exclusively so.

In the US, the drinking age everywhere, due to Federal pressure on the topic, is 21. When I was 19, the drinking age in Wyoming was 19, which it had been dropped to during the Vietnam War due to the same logic that prevailed regarding voting.   

As of 2019, the minimum age to buy tobacco is 21.  In most of "progressive" Canada, it's 18.  Where it isn't 18 in Canada, it's 19.

In much of the US, you can drive at age 16.  This is true in Canada and Mexico as well, but the global norm, although there's lots of variety in it, is 18.

In most of the US you have to be at least 20 to rent a car, although as a practical matter, that age is really 23.

Odd, isn't it?

Research has determined that the male brain continues to develop until age 25, which is when men basically reach maturity, whereas for women it's 21.  Some studies push that up to 25 for men and women. A British study found that men reach full emotional maturity at approximately age 43, whereas women do at 32, which is a bit of a different thing than developmental maturity.

Which brings us to this.

The founders setting the voting age at 21 reflected their actual experience.  People like to imagine that everybody did everything younger back in the day, but this isn't really the case at all.  As we've discussed here before, actual marriage ages haven't changed hardly at all since the Middle Ages.  They'll occasionally go up (usually due to economic conditions), and rarely go down, but they return to a well established median.   The current "everyone is getting married older" story really reflects the latter.

Marriage, rather obviously, was allowed at a younger age than 21, but there are biological factors at work there that would tend to explain that, at least up until the government became the substitute daddy allowing men to evade responsibility for their offspring.

The odd thing about age in the early history of the country was the age for compulsory bearing of arms was 18.  Why?  No idea.  When conscription first came about, it was set at age 21, the age you could vote, and remained that age until the Second World War, when it was dropped to 18.

Driving ages are at low ages in North America because of farm economies.  Lots of drivers were, at one time, young farm drivers.

Which brings us to this.

The current pattern of living may reflect the historic norm in the US more than we suppose.  We've dealt with it before, but up until World War Two, the basic norm for most men was to leave high school, by graduation or otherwise, and then go to work.  Most men lived at home until they married.  Most women lived at home until they married. And for most, they were 21 years of age or older at that time.  The World War Two period brought in a demographic and behavioral exception, but it was due to external forces.  Large scale conscription and a booming economy, following the Great Depression, followed by the massive expansion of the economy and higher education.  The trend that started in 1939 lasted a few decades, but we've seen a return to the older pattern of living more recently.

Which perhaps gets back to this.

The new gun control provision probably makes a lot of sense.  There are reasons to preclude people who have not reached maturity from buying firearms.

But there are probably reasons not to allow them to do other responsible things as well, including voting.

Maybe, looked at this rationally and scientifically, the military ought to not be open to enlistment until age 21.  Maybe the "age of consent", or exploitation, ought to be 21.  Maybe public education ought to expand up to age 21.

Juxtaposition and Bad Analysis

I unfortunately seem to have to stop by the grocery store about every other day. There's some things we forgot to get last time we were there, and some of them you can't put off.  So, quite a bit, I find myself in the grocery line at Albertson's or Riddley's sometime between 5 and 6 p.m.

I invariably end up noticing the magazine covers as I wait.  I don't really want to, I just do. And, because of that, I've been seeing the creepy robe wearing visage of an ossified Hugh Hefner staring out smiling from Life Magazine in a special issue, the only kind Life does anymore, dedicated to his memory.  As we recently passed his death.  His life, we're told, is to be celebrated as he broke down those musty old standards and let in the bright light of the "sexual revolution".

What he actually did, of course, is tell all men that the girl next door was theirs for the taking and that she probably had enormous boobs.  In real life, Hefner was married when he started out his smut based enterprise but that soon ended and, if the stories are to believed, females in the Playboy enterprise, or at least some of them, could expect to be screwed in Hefner's office.  Certainly the "girlfriends" who lived in his mansion knew that was part of the deal as they signed up for concubinage in order to advance their "careers" or to just have a roof over their heads.

Every morning, of course, we start off with the Today Show and I usually crank up my computer, both of which give me the current news. And much of that news has recently been on the topic of men who have been revealed to have engaged in "inappropriate behavior".  Matt Lauer has been a frequent topic of that recently with lurid tales of workplace skirt chasing and his conquering of various female subjects, all so far, if what we are hearing is correct, seem to have been purely voluntary, but to have submitted to sex, we're told, as he was their boss.

In other words, Lauer, who has earlier related that he grew up in a home in which his parents had no religious values at all, his father having abandoned his Jewish faith and his mother never having one, apparently, lived liked Hefner.  And that was the way that up until recently was supposedly the liberated cool dude way to live, assuming the tales about him have some grounding in reality (his first wife, he's been married twice, wholly denies the accusations being made against Lauer, and unless he underwent a radical personality shift that should tell us something).

And, sometime during the week, I listen to the weekend news shows which are also dealing with the same story of Lauer and all his many fellows.  Indeed, fellows who have transgressed in varying degrees.  Lauer, if the stories are true, was truly a Hefneresque cad, but that may be all he was, with Hefner's lesson to men about women, they'll submit, proven correct.  Others are like Al Franken, lately Senator from Minnesota, who engaged in lessor behavior but have now paid the price, even if in his case his rise to power was based on fame generated through gross humor of the sophomoric type for which grabbing butts and boobs is par for the course, and everyone should have known that.  And there's all manner of bad behavior in between.

And in each weekend show there's a cry about how are we going to create a new standard.

Eh?

Isn't something obvious here?

We had that standard.  Guys like Hefner tore it down, guys like Lauer lived the new libertine one that was supposedly cool in its place, and now the inevitable messed up wrecked lives and consequences of that have come roaring back.

As yes, the First Law of Behavior and the Fourth.  

Laws of that type simply can't be broken.

And reinventing the wheel isn't necessary.  It's just remembering where you put it.

Maybe you "can't go home again". . .but you sure don't have to keep traveling in the same stupid direction.

"You can't go home again"

Thomas Wolfe, from the novel by the same name.*

"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it."

Adulterated version of a statement by George Santayana.**

"You are going home again."

Holscher's First Law of Human Behavior

The other day (actually quite a few days ago now), I published this rant:

Lex Anteinternet: How dense we've become. Denver Topless Day, How g...: This is, I'll confess, a full blown rant. Which means, perhaps, that I shouldn't publish it at all.  If I do, it means I've o...

Since that time I've published what might perhaps be an ancillary rant on a related topic.  And I've had to endure and endless number of political debates and Facebook posts on the current election, a lot of which are based on assumptions of a necessary straight line progression from point A to point B, with perhaps the only question being where point B is, although it's pretty evident that a lot of the debaters aren't very aware of where point A was.

It's time to rethink a lot of this.

It might at first blush (assuming that modern Americans are capable of even blushing, given that a sense of decency has declined to shocking level that the "cow town" city of Denver Colorado now features stoners on the street (and airport) and an annual Topless Day) seem that Denver Topless Day, local baloonification surgery, and political debates have nothing to do with the express purpose of this blog, as related in our very first post.  In that, of course, we claimed:

The intent of this blog is to try to explore and learn a few things about the practice of law prior to the current era. That is, prior to the internet, prior to easy roads, and the like. How did it work, how regional was it, how did lawyers perceive their roles, and how were they perceived?

But maybe it actually does.

As readers of this blog know, this blog focuses on the period of about 1890 until about 1920, although it strays a lot. Recently there's been a lot of threads on the year 1916 (which are on point, I'd note) which is due to the centennial of the Punitive Expedition.  Indeed, this year has featured a lot more posts than prior years, and in no small part due to that centennial.

One of the purposes of the blog was, as noted in the first post, was to look at life a century ago. And in doing that, we've learned a lot about that era in a way that we wouldn't necessarily have known otherwise.  I can't say that it's become on obsession, but once you learn stuff its hard to ignore it.  And it's hard not to draw conclusions and make some comparisons.

Now, I have no intent of romanticizing the past, which I've posted about before. The past wasn't really all that romantic and it had plenty of problems.  In 1916, rather obviously, there was a titanic problem in the works in the form of World War One, which any way you look at it is a war which doesn't really leave a person feeling all that nifty about it.  What was it about?  Even now, there's lots of answers to that question, but there's no real agreement on any of them.  Yesterday, as a recent example, we learned of the tragic loss of life on Lake Erie in a storm, much of which can be attributed to nonexistent, nearly, weather reporting in that era combined with a complete lack of ship to shore, or ship to ship, communications.  Those men died alone, as nobody could have known what was happening to the.

Pretty grim.

But we also have to admit that in some ways the past compares very favorably with the present, and there are definitely lessons to be learned. . . and applied.

Santayana actually said "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it"  That is undoubtedly true and there's plenty of evidence of that.  Some, or Americans any way, are fond of quoting Thomas Wolfe in the fashion quoted above, which came from a novel (making the utility of the quote at least somewhat questionable).  His actual expanded line, from the novel is:  "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time – back home to the escapes of Time and Memory."

Well, maybe you can't go home again (or maybe you really can, in part). . . but you sure don't have to keep going in the same stupid direction.

 Straight line to somewhere, but where?  History doesn't have to work this way.

That often seems to be the lesson that people take away. That is, the opposite one.  In other words, if you can't go home again, which may not be an accurate statement in the first place, you have to keep on keeping on in the direction you are going.

Even if you don't like it.

And there's plenty of evidence that people actually aren't all that keen on the direction that the country and society is heading.

The country was never prefect by a long shot but what we can seemingly tell is that people did like the slower and much more rural aspect of American society in prior eras. As we've gotten away from that, and have been told that we had to, we've developed what seems to be a national psychosis.  Depression is rampant, a large number of Americans have to be medicated just to tolerate their daily lives and work lives.  Estimates are that up to, and even over, 70% of Americans don't like their jobs.  And it also seems fairly clear that the decay in social standards, which is encouraged by the political left on the country,  has not liberated anyone, but rather made quite a few miserable and many more confused.  The Justice Kennedyesque Utopia promised to be around the corner, hasn't been.

Huh. . . Utopia wasn't there. . . but maybe its off these tracks?

We're like the polar bear at the Denver Zoo.  It knows that Denver in the summertime isn't the high Arctic and there's nothing you can do to fool it.  Even putting in your employee cafeteria and exercise room isn't going to do it, just as it isn't doing it for the bear.

 

I'm not picking on the Denver Zoo.  But it knows that this isn't the Arctic and this isn't where it's supposed to be.  But maybe we know that a little too?

And yet we keep on keeping on in this direction.

We really don't have to.

There's no reason that, in 2016, we need to keep this direction going.  We don't need to become more urban. We really don't have to have an ever expanding population in order to support the old, an endgame which has a curious result at some point, and require people to be ever and ever tighter packed in terminally same cities. We really don't need to keep favoring larger and larger centralized entities over smaller and more local ones.  We don't really need to pretend that people don't have an ingrained natural nature, and that, in our imperfect world, many of us don't quite match it, but ignoring it in the name of diversity or equality is going to bring perpetual personal and connubial bliss.  We don't have accept that everyone everywhere can, or is even capable of, defining a personal reality that's separate from, well, reality.

We just seem to assume that we do.

Well, we don't have to.

And we shouldn't, the evidence seems clear, as its pretty clear that the Humanistic Millennial Age will, in fact, not be arriving.  And indeed, we can at least suspect that those prior generations at some point, perhaps in the era we focus on here, or perhaps slightly later, might actually have been more content, at least while not fighting in wars or struggling on sinking ships.

But it is also clear that to do nothing, is to elect to keep traveling the same direction we already are.