AS I'VE WRITTEN BEFORE, I had the lie of Age=Authority shown to me early in life. Whether it was the peer beat-downs that sometimes found me due to my being a tiny kid; the police occasionally appearing as adversaries to my family or their friends; the rebellious music I grew up hearing; the fact that my caretakers were at times drastically incompetent or hostile or both; or certain teachers displaying inappropriate stupidity, immaturity, or outright aggression—I labored under no belief that big people were infallible or expert.

I moved around. A lot. In some places, I found that this skepticism was not necessarily the norm in my peer groups. Some friends (most, in some areas) seemed to have kneejerk reactions to authority, be it teacher, priest, police, or parent. That reaction was to publicly obey, even to fear, to reflexively genuflect. Regardless of what the friend said, felt, or did in private. I did not, at least, suffer that contradiction. Perhaps that is unfortunate...and yet in the world I've known, it was best. Either way, it eventually labeled me as insubordinate, rebellious, and trouble. But what is a child to do in the face of fake and often-harmful authority—but rage?

The realization hit me over and over, though. I think we have a sense built in, a sense that expects the aged to know more. It would stand to reason. Biologically sound. Perpetuates necessary bonds and perhaps life-saving obeisance to caretakers.

Our first systems of hierarchy are probably age. Kids boast of a quarter-year seniority on each other, and it means all the world, and none of them argue the standard of measurement. It makes sense. Because even one day in a life can add an unmeasurable amount of wisdom. Should we choose to take it.

That's the thing. That's what rose up and hit me again. Even with all I had learned about authority figures, I was stunned later to realize how many adults remained as children. And I don't mean childlike. I mean childish.

I remember I was about 25 and working landscaping. That's the kind of work—labor, roofing, landscaping, stock—that I held for most of the years between 14 and 27, in fact. And I liked my boss. He was a cool cat, I thought. And then at a certain point he began dating my mother. I wasn't too sure about that scene in general. I didn't trust it. It's one thing to know a Cool Cat, but when they date your mother, you have to pop on a different lens. What made the situation more uncomfortable was that he was my landlord.

I hadn't figured it out yet, but I would soon. That he was wholly uncomfortable with any relationship unless he had a greater share of power in that relationship. He would have parties and who would be invited? All his tenants, all his employees. Looking around at the crowd, I'd think to myself the power all flows one way. Don't get me wrong, he didn't stomp about like Mussolini. He really was a Cool Cat. And you might not notice these kinds of things if you weren't looking closely, or had no reason to do so.

Well, it spun out of control, of course. He turned out to be a real jerk to my mother, and I threatened to jump him in an unannounced alley of random happenstance. (I didn't know that I could do it, but I didn't generally think about those things in advance.) Needless to say, he didn't renew my lease that year.

I had been sort of looking up to him before that. I felt he had treated me like a Man when we were on the job. A good "boss" overall. He was the one who first told me that you owe your employer nothing but a hard day's work and it is in exchange for them giving you a fair day's pay. He said "You don't owe me for the job. It's an arrangement that benefits both of us." And I liked that.

And yet I found it very odd later that while he intellectually understood that, well, "with great power comes great responsibility" and part of that responsibility is allowing those with less power to have 100% of their dignity, he lived otherwise. And yes, being the student of human nature and psychology that I am, I figured out why he needed these unequal arrangements to feel safe. But that's his life story.

I began thinking more about his life. And how he was, in many ways, running from fears in his past. And that really made me think. Somehow I had (still) been harboring some odd belief that by the time you are in your 40s, you are not ducking and dodging demons and acting out stupidly. I know, it's very naive. Hell, I knew I was screwed up. But it hit me all at once that you could live so much of your life (well, I was 25...45 seemed old then!) and still be acting out blindly on dumb shit that someone half your age was wrestling with. It seemed a waste of years. Not advancing. Stuck.

And I decided that I wouldn't become like him. Or that I didn't want to. That even if I was still screwed up at 45, I would spend as much energy as I could muster to be self-aware. That if I could manage it, I would not be run around ragged by my unsolved riddles.

Well, I am about 14 years older now. And I'm probably a bit less harsh, less judgmental, though it doesn't mean I don't look as hard. But I feel more understanding of human nature in general. Perhaps a bit more forgiving. Living 14 years and making your own share of mistakes will do that to you. Teach you a little humility, if you're hungry.

I find it a tragedy that in some cases, school is a stand-in for education. Or age, a stand-in for wisdom. They are not. There is potential, and then there is potential left stalled and stilled. There is a window painted shut, there is a book never touched. There is a path left alone. There is the comfortable throne. There is the appearance of wisdom and authority, and then there is wisdom. And authority. Symbol and Essence.

It might be easy to distill from some of this that I am anti-authority, or even that in my youth I had an "authority problem." But that is reductive and misses the heart of this story.

When I was 23, I wrote a song called Inside This Little Room. And in that song there is a line "I'm looking for someone who deserves to be the boss." It's hard to get a feel for the song from that...it was a collection of lines that might not have seemed related, and that was by no means the theme. It just rhymed, and could mean something to the right listener. But the vocal inflection was on deserves.

When I write that I had seen through the lie of Age=Authority or that Symbol of Authority=Authority, it just means I had enough self-respect as a child—despite what anyone around me tried to assert—to know I deserved better in the cases where I was under unworthy authority, or had valid thoughts or visions, when I was told or made to feel otherwise. There can be a grain in the psyche (and I love what Jung says about grace) that allows one to create their own lessons and results, resistant to prevailing odds or formulas. And there came a point where I felt not one person in authority could be trusted or deserved that status. And yet it did not make me give up on what authority can mean in a human.

Through it all, I believe in Masters. I believe we need Masters. And Mentors. Those can be bulky and angled words, let me tell you what I mean before anyone leaps up with cries of patriarchal systems and hierarchies of power.

For one thing, I don't mean "master" like slave/master. More like masterful. Master of her art. You have not "arrived," perhaps...but you are now refining and deepening. No longer struggling, learning or even thinking about the fundamentals anymore; those are reflexive and hardly separate from you now. As a master, you are doing original things with your area, and in ways, redefining it simply by applying your style, which by now is a culmination of technique learned and technique adapted and discovered. (Incidentally, this is separate from inherent ability or "genius" to me; mastery very definitely involves technique and practiced skill.) This is not THE definition, of course, this is simply mine at the moment. But it is good that you know how I am using it here.

For another, I don't think there needs to be just one, nor that a Master or a Mentor need be named as such. In fact, I've had one time when someone formally requested I be their Mentor and another where someone presumptuously assumed they could be my Mentor (that's the Cool Cat above and I do find it so arrogant to assume you can be someone's mentor let alone speak it aloud!) and in both instances the naming did nothing to advance the essence of that potential relationship. And I think probably only hindered it.

I'm still busy trying to master my own abilities. With each year, I grow more respectful of those who have spent time and years at a craft, study, or agenda. I understand what love, well-wrought, can bring to bear. I respect age. I respect age when it is not wasted looking back at immature stages and thinking them more worthy. There is a difference between Kahlil Gibran's telling us that children do not belong to us but are on loan and have wisdom that can guide us, and in placing the appearance of youth above all other values.

Think about the message it sends children when all the ads or storylines—direct and indirect—are screaming out our fixation with youth and youthful appearance. When all the messages children are soaking up is that Old is loathesome, or simply undesirable. This is the world upended. This is a message sent to the start that the end is terrible. This is casting aside anything beautiful about a life well-lived and replacing it with self-denial. This is an early grain of harm we shove down the childrens' throats. It blossoms. Into disrespect for the aged, disintegration of family, perverse worship of the skin and the shell, loss of such precious and necessary teachers already among us—the keepers of history, the stories that should remind and sustain us, the honey squeezed patiently from a lifetime of pollen.

So ageism abounds, yes. But it seems to me that our culture teaches it from the beginning. Perhaps the amount of ageism one harbors (to be very generalized about the whole thing) has to do with how many older people in one's life were presented as worthy, and who presented as worthy. Because maybe, too, this respect must be earned.

There are those times in your early childhood when you have a moment of epiphany or an awareness that rings out loudly and clearly and never stops. Moments that serve as a tuning fork for the rest of your life, sounding out a true C note so you can always get yourself in key when you choose. For me one of those moments was when I realized, at about four, that an adult was lying to me. They were lying to me about what they were holding in their hands, perhaps because they thought I didn't know what it was. And I was extremely and profoundly puzzled as to why they were trying to convince me it was something that it wasn't. I didn't really "get" lying until that point. And then the instant I did get it, I found it troubling that a grownup was so bad at it.

I didn't know, of course, that this "grownup" was probably about 22. You know how it is when you're not even five! There is, again, that instinct of deference.

Later, this note ringing out was harmonized by other incidents. Like when adults talked down to me as a teenager, or thought I was five years younger than I was (I've always looked a bit younger than I am.) So this persistent awareness added to the fact that I grew up looking very much younger than I was, I ended up feeling that adults were rather...obvious and clumsy in many cases.

I swore to myself then that I would never be so stupid, never talk to a kid as if I knew more than I did, or lie to them, or in general, insult their intelligence. Because to the kid, you do look stupid. You do look like a poseur. You should know better. You should know better than to tell a lie to a child. As adults we spend a good part of our day bolstering our little lies, refining our rationalizations, confusing ourselves into circles. Man, I think it's part of the regular routine in a crazy world. But as a child we are, obviously, much less practiced and I think, better able to sense untruth. At least that's what I planted in my own mind way back then.

And I kept that vow, you know? I did. It wasn't even hard.

I was a counselor for a time, that's one of the things I did. Handled problem kids! And sometimes, their families. I became valued quickly at the first clinic I worked at. I began interning there. But was soon handling my own caseload of young people, because they responded very well to me. They responded so well that the clinic offered me a company car and my own title to come work for them straight out of school. And what was my secret? Easy. I didn't bullshit the "kids" in my caseload. Not an ounce. I didn't moralize, either. I told them, firstly, they were in unfair positions. Because man, they were. But that's another story.

I talked to them about what it's like when you're caught up in the system, and probably there because some messed up shit happened and you are having to deal with it. About how most authorities in their lives might be seeing it. And from there I segued into just talking about the practical landscape of the immediate world. And described the possible consequences of certain behaviors. I allowed them to separate how they felt about what they had to do to get through from what they had to do. I admitted to them the world was often stacked against them. I told them what a time I had had of it. I didn't pretend that we live in a world we don't. I spoke of the world that IS.

And really, I simply talked to them the way I would have wanted to be talked to as a young man. I met that challenge others left open. I became that person who talked real to them, admitted their challenges were real, and that it was okay to be pissed off about it.

You grow up and wonder why the world is so fucked up. Thus the passion and indignance and vehemence of the young. They are not yet compromised. They know what they stand for, and believe in. They know wrong when they see it! If they are encouraged to see it. It is true that you can teach a child all the wrong things. I'm not saying every kid is a font of clarity and wisdom. I'm saying, though, that we begin that way.

And later, too often, young people have to contend with their elders often saying "Oh stop dreaming. Oh stop being naive. This is the way life is. This is the way life always will be." I nearly tore holes in my life as a teen because I felt I was growing up in a crazed society. I saw all the wrongness. And I heard the excuses. And I could
not
make
it
fit.

Everyone seemed complacent, accepting of an unacceptable situation. I did literally feel I was going mad with it all. And that's youth, isn't it?

Rachel Maddow was on the air recently, incensed with righteous anger and allowing herself to feel it. Allowing herself to access her higher self, saying "I know this makes me sound naive, but it's wrong to lie when you attack your opponent!"

Bless you Rachel. Thank you, Rachel. That is correct. That is how we want to be. We need to stand just as tall as the truths children believe in instinctively. Not let the grit and piss and stain and sour wind of wretched hopelessness and capitulation to the currents of the system wear us down to where we accept Lie as Truth. It's as if we have a collective death wish, to abdicate spiritual integrity so casually.

Why not ageism if the adults around you are full of shit and lost and justifying torture and speaking out both sides of their face and killing each other and CLEARLY out of their minds??? At one point you do give up in a sense, don't you? It's "the world won't change" moment. Or maybe it's the "I'm just trying to make a living" moment. Or maybe its the "don't have time to worry about that" moment. I don't think any of them are unearned. Or unjustified. It's hard sometimes to tell where the system ends and where a person begins. But don't most of us meet that moment where our clarity of vision meets hard, hard practicality? Do we surrender too much, too easily?

We need to become masters. And become students. And remember the note ringing out all our lives. We need to teach children that it is a glorious gift, these days stacked together. If we feel bad about the lines in our faces, we need to invent stories again that explain them. Is Science the best explanation? Does that tell the truth of those lines? When you talk of a scar, do you speak of the keratin? Or do you speak of the lesson? We need to not chuckle over the indigenous fables, but respect them for what they are: humans who were wise enough to know how to teach, how to instill the worth and truth one knew into a reality one could not personally explain.

People like John McCain suffer from ageism? Yes. And you know what else? People like John McCain are a big reason there is ageism. People who demonstrate to children watching that their grandest words are like shitsmears across the eyesockets of a fine cotton mask, that their smile could sparkle even while they choked you (or maybe just their c**** of a wife), that they will stand for everything they said they stood against are the reason children grow up and have no respect for adults and empty authority and age.

Why should they? It comes down to self-respect. Any self-respecting person loathes a transparent fraud.

We need to connect beauty and age again. Not on John McCain's watch. He is no lesson of what age can bring. His is the lesson of wasted wisdom.

But of course, this is much bigger than John McCain and the 08 election. This is about our culture for the next 50 and 100 years and all that springs from that.

We must remember and practice that children's hearts, self-worth, and "I" are just as big as anyone's—even when their vocabulary and dexterity and mass is less. We must make ourselves and our politics, even, into examples of which we can be fiercely proud, not just able to rationalize. We need to stop teaching fear of age and worship of youth. We need to teach a model of authority that both gives and commands respect, not one that denies it to the weaker and then screams and wheedles for some back. We need to make the best use of our own days, strive to learn, to study, to understand, to master our own method.

Ultimately, ageism is of another problem. For there are certain principles that are lost in the rush to capitalist and materialist goals. That no thing of worth is produced without time passing and energy spent; that there is no such thing as a shortcut, for this balance is inescapable; that the external can obscure the true value, and someone with ten years on you may know of an entire world you've not even heard of.

Or they may have just spent more days kicking around the planet.

Crossposted to The Unapologetic Mexican [1] and The Wild Wild Left [2].