Let’s All Grow Up!

24 May Let’s All Grow Up!

Humanity’s current state of affairs can be seen as an initiation from cultural adolescence to planetary adulthood. Through this lens, the challenge we’re going through is a story about growing up. 

Maybe endless consumption is just what a teenager does as they complete their growth spurt and stabilize at their adult size. Maybe our violence and rampant narcissism isn’t our basic nature, but just an immature phase we’ll eventually grow out of.

Most people associate the phrase, “Grow Up!” with a scolding from parents when we were having a really good time. We think it means we have to curtail our fun and start acting straight-laced and boring.  And that makes us resist the process.

But growing up actually means that our lives expand. We learn to drive, we have a wider circle of friends, we can travel, learn, and expand our horizons. We have more choices available to us, a wider world to live in, and can expand our possibilities. As we mature, we have greater privilege, not less. 

Growing up as a species means that we clean up our messes, use resources wisely, plan for the future, and treat each other respectfully. Growing up means letting go of the naïve view that everybody is just like we are and there’s something wrong with them if they’re different.

Growing up means that we understand the consequences of our actions and even more, take responsibility for them. Growing up means that the things we take for granted will not be supplied endlessly for free, and that we will soon have to become sustainable.  Growing up means we no longer rely on parental authority to dictate our reality, but take things into our hands, make our own decisions, and live with our own consequences. Growing up means we move from blind obedience to co-creation.

Practices have been handed down to us by spiritual elders through the ages to help us grow up at this crucial time: the practices of meditation, yoga, martial arts, eating mindfully, watching the breath, saying a prayer, chanting, fasting, and yes, even simple things like cleaning our room and being nice to each other.

These practices actually expand our state of being. They make us healthier, more aware, more capable, and give us more energy. Even if we give up something, we are getting back so much more. We need to realize that giving up some of our privilege makes the world better for all.

Another part of growing up means that we reach our adult size and stop expanding physically. For humanity, this means controlling population. Overpopulation is a fundamental cause of pollution, climate change, resource depletion, inner city poverty, and immigration issues.  We cannot continue to expand indefinitely, without massive starvation, environmental collapse, and people turning on each other, just like every other species when they get overcrowded.

Birth control and the right of women to have power over their own bodies is a fundamental aspect to controlling population.  If we already have too many people, and we don’t want to see them killed off with war and starvation, the least we can do is keep unwanted pregnancies from coming to term, when it is the will of the mother to do so.

Abortion bans at this time on the planet are an overreach of our adolescent short sightedness, and an over extension of an outdated parental moral system that has nothing to do with real morals, and everything to do with female oppression. 

The fact that the same party that wants to restrict abortion also wants to restrict birth control, and cares little or nothing for a child after it’s been born is evident in the separation of children from parents at the border, fighting against health care for children and their parents, and slashing education budgets, to say nothing of ravaging the world that will be their future home. This is a an immature facet of humanity that is working against evolution, not for it.

So let’s all grow up. Let’s realize that adults have sex, and that birth control, and abortion when necessary, are adult rights that actually protect the sanctity of life into the future. Rather than taking a life, these practices save millions of lives by protecting the planet from the rape and ravage of an endlessly expanding adolescent culture.

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