Hey Barack, Fix the Problem Not the Blame!!

    Although there are many things that disappoint me about the performance of our current President, there is nothing as irritating as his apparent disinterest in actually fixing problems.  More and more he has shown that he is just another run of the mill politician who is more eager to pontificate on politically motivated dogma than he is in actually creating coalitions of knowledgeable people who can come up with plausible solutions.

    The Gulf oil spill is a classic example.  In Obama's book, The Audacity of Hope, he states on page 10 that "I wish the country had fewer lawyers and more engineers".  I was reading this lying in bed one night and when I read that sentence I damn near stood up to applaud.  OK so here comes a test and instead of sending engineers and scientists who might be able to come up with solutions he sends a team of lawyers.  Given the serious nature of the event, the uncertainty surrounding its cause, and the potentially devastating consequences, why can't we have a leader who just once could do his best Bill Parcells or Tom Landry impersonation and rally up the troups to accomplish a task?

   

Young Adult Infantilization

And so we begin the annual process of infantilizing young adults.  I am speaking of the event that occurs each year when newspapers across the country publish articles right around graduation time about why we should raise the age for young adults to acquire drivers licenses.  They quote statistics and publish headlines along the nature that 15% of all accidents involve 16 year old drivers.  Or, in states where the age has been raised to 17 the headline remains the same but the age is raised.  I would submit to you that if the age was raised to 18, 21, or 42 the statistics would remain the same but with a different age.

Let's face it, young adults tend to live up or down to our expectations.  If we expect them to act responsibly by and large they will.  But if we keep telling them how unable they are to achieve one thing or another they come to believe that as well.  Here's a suggestion.  If 16 year olds are involved in 15% of all car accidents, let's let them drive and ban everyone else.  That would eliminate at least 85% of accidents and probably reduce the 16 year old accidents as well due to all those other cars being off the road!!

Let's face it.  Airplanes cause death and injuries, lawn mowers cause death and injuries, and although I'll leave it to others to research the data I would suspect that 150 years ago horse drawn plows did the same.  Admittedly, young adult driving can result in tradgedies but so can lots of other activities. The fact is that this is not an intrinsically safe world that we live in.  Shit happens but get off their backs.

Increasing driving ages only makes young adults more dependent and that is not something we should be working toward.  I want those kids to learn to be independent and to learn to make decisions on their own.  In most states young adults under the age of 18 can be legally married with parental consent.  Raising the driving age might be a boon to cab and limosine businesses since young adults won't be able to drive to their own weddings but in today's economy it will be tough to fill those jobs since people can make more money by being on unemployment but that will be a topic for another day.

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