On being an only child.

My father (left as viewed) and his siblings.  I don't know the date, but given their apparent ages, this photograph would have been taken in Scotsbluff, Nebraska, in the late 1930s.  His borther is the only one left alive.  My father was the first to pass, at age 62.

My father was very close to his three siblings, one of whom is still living.  He was particularly close to that sibling, his brother.  They spoke by phone nearly every day when my uncle, who was a fireman, was not working.

My mother's parents and their children.  My mother is seated, fourth from the left as viewed, next to her mother.  Her youngest sister, seated far right, was the first to pass.

My mother was close to most of her siblings.  They were a feisty bunch in general, and they argued amongst themselves, but they were close. Like all such relationships, some were closer than others.  My mother was particularly close to her youngest sibling, one of her four brothers (she had three sisters as well), and he was very close to her.  A very long-lived family as a rule, her sisters have passed, but three of her brothers are living.

I'm an only child.

That was not my parent's desire.  They simply had a very hard time having children, and they were not young when they married, really.  Indeed, in the common understanding of the time, while they'd be regarded as "young" today, but only barely so, at the time of their marriage, at the time, they would have been regarded as middle-aged. Certainly my mother would have been, she being three years older than my father. They were married five years at the time of my birth, and she was 37 years old.  My birth was it, she'd never have another child.  Indeed, in retrospect, while was a remarkably fit person her entire life, my birth took a lot out of her in other ways and a significant psycho-medical decline would set in with in thirteen years of that event.

When you grow up as an only child, you constantly hear how "lucky" you are.  That's the point of the post.  You really aren't.

People like to imagine that only children are "spoiled", but at least in my case that wasn't true. The concept of being spoiled even has a name, Only Child Syndrome, but research has shown it's largely a myth.  My parents probably made a dedicated effort to keep that from happening to me.  What you are, however, is deprived in some very significant ways, all of which have to do with the close bonds that form between siblings being absent.

If you grow up an only child, you miss out on ever having that close relationship that can only come through a blood bond.  Siblings never escape their siblings, even under extreme stress. This is not true of any other relationship whatsoever, although a real, not an American Civil Religion, marriage does that in another fashion.  

And having siblings teaches you things that lacking them does not, and which can never be made up for.

Growing up as a child, my closest friends were my parents.  Having no siblings to distract me, if I wanted to interact with somebody close to me, my parents filled that role.  In most houses, you see children play various sorts of games with each other.  I'd certainly do that with friends, but there was no playing board games or card games with my siblings. I've never developed an affinity for card games, although both of my parents were good at them, and my father taught them to me.  For board games, however, my father was the go to.  It wasn't until I was an adult that I appreciated that most children, if they wanted to play a board game, would do it with a sibling.

Moreover, if adults are your playmates, you enter the adult world very quickly.  And not only that, you enter the adult world of your parents.  Either genetically or through environment, I obtained my parent's love of history very rapidly.  Not only that, however, but I entered it at an adult level quite quickly.  When I went from grade school to junior high at 7th Grade, at which time I was 12 years old, I remember being glad that the library had such adult books.  One of the first I checked out was Cornelius Ryan's A Bridge Too Far.  The sight of a short 12-year-old lugging up the massive tome to the library desk caused the librarian to nearly reject checking it out to me, and she warned me that it was a book for adults.  I was stunned.  I was reading adult books at home already, almost all the history tomes.  I loved A Bridge Too Far.

This made me, I suppose, "bookish" and it gave people the illusion that I'm "smart".  My father and mother were both extremely intelligent, likely both geniuses actually, but I'm not as smart as either one of them by a long measure.  I'm just well-read, really.  And being an only child makes you a loner in significant ways, as you do so much all by yourself that other people simply do not.

In my case, this was amplified at age 13 when my mother became profoundly ill.  Then it was me and my father, and from that point on, really, I was an adult.  And for a lot of things, I was an adult with nobody to turn to.  My father was my closest friend, although I certainly had other friends, but the problems you take to your siblings, I bore, like I am sure all only children do, by myself.

I still largely do.

This makes for a rough existence in a lot of ways.  As an adult, I really didn't have anyone to go to advice to.  I mostly made my own decisions, and started doing that at about age 13.  A lot of those decision, made only in the context of my own experience, were wrong.  Being insecure about the state of existence itself due to my mother's condition and due to a childhood asthma condition, I valued security way over that which other people do, which ironically ends up making you potentially insecure in certain fundamental ways.  My post high school academic career can probably be defined by that.  I studied geology first, and then law, not because of a deep love of the topic, but because they seemed to offer secure occupations.

My father died when I was in my 30s.  My mother when I was much older, I think in my early 50s.  With them both gone, there is no connection like that.  My wife was great during my mother's illness, particularly since they did not get along, but the strain of that did not help in our relationship and continues to have a lasting impact.  I can't go to siblings like she does with family problems, and her being the one I'm closest to on earth means that I'm uniquely vulnerable there in a way, frankly, that she is not.  My connection with things, basically, is razor-thin.

I note all of this for a simple reason.

Being a teenager without siblings proved to be difficult.  As a young adult, out in the world like young men are, I didn't notice it at all, but once my parents started their final descent, the lack of a sibling was agonizing.  As I've aged now into my 60s, I feel imperiled by it.  I wish I had a brother to talk to, like my father did, or like my mother did.

I don't understand why married couples forego children, and in a lot of ways I feel that people who don't have kids never really become adults.  Those having children, however, shouldn't have a single child.  It's not fair to the child.

What the Young Want.* The Visual Testimony of the Trad Girls. The Authenticity Crisis, Part One.

Or maybe they're not.

At any one time, I have a bunch of posts in the works, some of which are on concurrent themes. This is one, basically, as it touches on a larger topic.

Something is going on.

A couple of years ago I started to see some women, by which I mean, let's say, women 40 years or older, resuming the wearing of chapel veils (mantillas).  They were clearly on the traditional end of things.

Recently, however, I'm seeing young women do this.

I shouldn't, probably, have used the term "girls" in the caption, but for whatever reason, culturally, we tend to use the term "girls" for young women well into their 20s.  Maybe somewhat beyond.  It seems to encompass women in their late teens on up to that point.

And that's what I'm referring to here.

I noticed it first the year before last, and at an early morning Mass on a Holy Day (All Saints Day, I think).  Two young women, probably very late teens or very early twenties, sat right in front of me.  One was dressed conservatively but contemporarily. She was wearing a leather skirt. . . and a chapel veil (mantilla).

Now, there was a young woman from a very trad family in the parish who dressed almost as if in a Medieval costume for young women every Mass. That's not what I'm talking about here.  This young woman was wearing a nice wool sweater, and a leather skirt, and a chapel veil.

It caught me off guard.

I'm seeing stuff like that all the time now.  Young women, often early twenties, dressed conservatively, but not in costume, who have adopted the mantilla.  Indeed, just yesterday, at the early morning Mass Sunday, the Church did the Ritual for the Elect for those who were coming into the Church.  They all have a sponsor.  One young woman coming in had, as her sponsor, another young women.  

Frankly, the sponsor was stunning.  And she was wearing a chapel veil.  Last Sunday across town there was another young woman dressed in that fashion who was eye catching as well, and the week before that there was another so dressed who was a head turner.**

I note that, as it was easy, when the only women who did this were let's say older, and otherwise dressed in a fashion that was old-fashioned, perhaps, or dour.  These young women aren't.   They're hard not to notice.

Indeed, yesterday, the young woman mentioned went from the front of the Church to the back with a very proud carriage, which is not to suggest sinful pride. Rather, she carried herself the way that people who are very self-assured, for very good reasons, do.

Something is going on.

And It's not just here.  A friend of mine in Oklahoma noticed the same thing at his local parish.  And it's crossed into other regions, or perhaps hit there first.  For example, notable Korean figure skater Yuna Kim is Catholic, and people like to snap photos of her at Mass wearing a chapel veil.

And it's interesting that this is going on at the same time that some members of the leadership of the Church, which tends to be up in years, seems to be trying to insert the liberal.  

I've often noticed that people who come up in particularly devise or stressed eras, and maybe more of us do than not, tend to form our view of the world in those times.  A lot of people in their upper 60s, 70s, and 80s assume that "what the young want" is what they wanted when they were young.  

The evidence for this is to the contrary.

There's a lot more to this.  It's interesting.

Footnotes

*It's important to note that categorizing what an entire generation, or generations, want is hazardous.  For example, at least superficially, here I'm noting a return to Catholic tradition among the same generation that is exhibiting such things as a belief that you can change your gender.

Well, a couple of things.

At any one time you can have an overall trend in a generation while individual members of it hold an opposite view.  There were, for example, more volunteers who served in Vietnam than there were conscripts, contrary to popular imagination, meaning that quite a few young men sought to serve in the war at the same time history informs us their generation had turned against it.  By the same token, you can find a few examples of Americans who were adamantly opposed to the country entering World War One or Two, and continued to hold that view after the country declared war.  Beatniks were a feature of the supposedly superconservative 1950s. 

Secondly, people are more complex than categorists and political parties may suppose, and as a result they can often hold contrary views, or views that seem to be contrary, or views contrary to the ones they themselves exhibit.  Indeed, I've heard some of the stoutest denouncements of tobacco from smokers.  They smoked, but wished they didn't. 

You get the point.

**For some reason, you're not supposed to say this. Well, noticing that a woman is attractive is not the same thing as engaging in Hefnereque behavior, and the fact that creeps have co-opted this entire aspect of communication is just evidence of how weird and pornified our culture is.

Gerontocracy. A Rant.

I recently posted this on our aviation blog:

The Aerodrome: When you are keeping the original barstormers flying.: 

When you are keeping the original barstormers flying.

I've posted about this elsewhere, when I was really miffed about it, but Wyoming's Cynthia Lummis has introduced a bill in the Senate to raise mandatory airline pilot retirement ages up to age 67.

Lummis is 68.

Let's note the trend here.  Lummis is 68.  Wyoming's John Barasso is 70.  Wyoming's Congressman Harriet Hageman, at age 60, could nearly be regarded as youthful.

Joe Biden is 80. Donald Trump is 77.  Chuck Schumer is 72.  Mitch McConnell is 81.

This is, quite frankly, absurd.

The United States is, without a doubt, a gerontocracy.

Okay, what's that have to do with airlines?

We repeatedly here there's a pilot shortage.  What is obviously necessary to, in regard to the shortage, is to recruit younger pilots into the field. That requires opportunity and a decent wage.

Vesting the good paying jobs in the elderly is not the way to achieve that.  Indeed, depressing the mandatory retirement age would be.

I suspect this bill will not pass, but the problem it notes is frankly severe.

Why is nothing getting done in this country?  And why are young people so disgruntled by work that old people complain about how disgruntled they are.

In large measure, this country and society is completely dominated by the elderly.

Now, this smacks of ageism, and it is. But there does come a time when one generation needs to back off and hand the reins to another.  The Baby Boomer generation is past that time, and it refused to yield.

It's absolutely insane that the two top contenders for the highest elected office in the nation is between two ancient men.  Seriously?  Can people whose world views were formed in the 60s really be expected to lead on any current crisis?  We've never expected such old people to rule in times of trouble before.

Franklin Roosevelt, who was regarded as old going into his fourth and fatally final term, was 63 years old when he died.

Woodrow Wilson, who lead the country through the Great War, was 67 when he died in 1924.  He outlived his great rival, Theodore Roosevelt, by several years.  TR died when he was 60, just as he'd always expected to.

Abraham Lincoln was 56 years old, serving in his second term, when he was assassinated.  I note that because in the greatest crisis in the country's history, we had a President in his 50s. . . not his 70s or 80s.

And its not just the Oval Office.  As noted above, the levers of Congress' machinery are held by the ancient, in many instances.  Wyoming just turned its Congressional seat over to a "freshman" who is now a freshman at age 60.

Lawyers at age 60, as she is, ought to be looking towards how things are going to be handled in the next decade as they inevitably face decline.  That doesn't mean taking up a leadereship role in teh country.

And people aren't really choosing these antiquarian figures. They have no choice.  It's much like this meme from the Simpson's that is so well know, it's traveled the globe:

And you do, as they have the money, even if they ironically don't have the members.

We repeatedly hear that Wyoming is the most "Red State" (meaning Communist, of course, oh wait ... not that means the most conservative as red is the color of socialism. . . oh wait, that's not right, blue is the international color of the far right so that means. . . oh never mind).  Even here, however, party registration breaks out in this fashion:

Sure, that means that "independents" are about 9% of the figure for Republicans, but we all know that at least a quarter of the GOP is made up of registrants who have gone there due to the Simpsonian monster.  If you want a voice, you have to vote in the GOP primary.  

And that means you have to accept that at the end of the day, the people you are voting in, with the odd exception of Chuck Gray, who is another topic, are going to be old.

And it's not just in politics.  Business is often, but not exclusively, dominated by the old.  In something, I personally follow, although not everyone does, the leadership of the Catholic Church, the Bishops, is elderly and heavily influenced by Priests who came of age in a liberal era, and therefore are in conflict with younger more conservative ones.

The law is dominated by the elderly as well.  Look at any Supreme Court, for the most part. Wyoming just took a failed run at raising the judicial retirement age up from the current age 70, which is pretty old.  It failed, but it had the backing of the Chief Justice of the state.  And this is the second time this has been tried in recent years.

For a variety of reason, for most of American history, people tended to step into their work in a major way in their 20s.  They were often very fully established by their 30s.  Doing that now is difficult in the extreme, thanks to people over 60.

People look back on certain generations that never had a voice. "Lost Generations".  Nearly everyone in the shadow of the Baby Boom Generation fits into that category to some extent, some more than others.

Be that as it may, we're not going to solve long term budget problems, energy problems, border problems, and the like, looking to people who look out and see the world through 1973 lenses.

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.