It's Johnny's Birthday!

Child worship expresses itself in probably it's most overt ways within the modern family. In a classic framing exercise, we could easily picture mother and father as the child's clergy, busying themselves maintaining their idol, singing its praises, and saluting it on the yearly anniversary of it's birth with a grand festival, where "it" refers to inhuman nature of the thing being worshiped--something indeed quite beyond the physical organism that a child really is.

To be clear, celebrating birthdays is not wrong minded, but it could be argued that the degree of lavishness they assume (usually at the behest of parents more than anything else) is only a depiction of the modern fascination and obsession with blowing children up to twice their normal size. It's only amazing they can manage to keep their feet on the ground.

At one time only the wealthy sons and daughters of self-important dignitaries and noblemen celebrated something as mundane as the yearly milestone known as a birthday with lavish parties. In the modern world, that distinction is reserved for every child. It seems the younger and less aware the child is, the more lavish the festival commemorating their birth has to be. We give them Jumperoos on their second birthday and yet still don't allow them to vote by their 16th. We're very good at blowing children up to be demi-gods alright, we're just not very good at deflating them back down to our size.

And then we expect our adolescents to begin coming down from Olympus on their own, to live like people for the first time after being restricted within the socially constructed walls of heaven all their lives. Suffice it to say, when their eyes finally shoot open at first to the world made not of dreams but out of the fear and desperation surrounding them, only one reaction seems appropriate at first--disillusionment. Some get over it. Some don't.

And then for the sciences to suggest that such a reaction is biochemically induced in its entirety, rather than the inevitable result of a demigod stepping down from his golden throne, it only reeks of same preferential prejudice that failed to let him be human in his first 13 years of life. The fact of the matter is, as far as the perspective from which research on the maturation of teens is conducted (one of squinted-eye observation), the child is no longer a child, and therefore in no more need to be worshiped. Is it no coincidence that once "playtime is over," the demonization of young people begins?

(A tip to George Harrison in the title.)