We're all big babies - by Michael Bywater The Telegraph

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We're all big babies
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 22/10/2006
How to be an adult
Michael Bywater


"Bombarded by petty rules, bossy advice and celebrity tittle-tattle, we have forgotton how to be adults. It's time we grew up, says Michael Bywater

I imagine myself to be a grown-up, as, presumably, do you. You think that because you negotiated puberty and developed secondary sexual characteristics, and got qualifications and opened a bank account and subjected yourself to the scrutiny of anti-terrorism laws and anti-money-laundering laws and learned to drive and got a job and perhaps a spouse and maybe children, and quite possibly even pay your taxes, you are a grown-up.


It's time to stop behaving like children and face up to responsibilities
Sometimes, things strike you as a bit odd. It strikes you, for example, as out of kilter that between getting off the plane and reaching the outside world at London Heathrow there were, at last count, 93 notices telling you off for things you hadn't done or which it hadn't even occurred to you to do.

The plain fact is that you are being treated like a baby. You, I, all of us are on the receiving end of a sustained campaign to infantilise us: our tastes, our responses, our behaviour, our private thoughts, our decisions, our buying habits, our philosophies, our political sensibilities.

We are told what to think. We are talked down to. We are distracted with colour and movement, patronised, spoon-fed, our responses pre-empted and our autonomy eroded with a fine, rich, heavily funded contempt.


....SNIP"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/core/Content/displayPrintable.jhtml?xml=/arts/2006/10/22/svbabies22.xml&site=6&page=0

Taken from'Big Babies' by Michael Bywater, published by Granta on 2 November. It is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p. To order, please call Telegraph Books on 0870 428 4115 john reynolds

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1. Kick for morning!

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2. kicked and recommended

awesome piece.

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3. The notion that moral relativeism is babying..I don't know that I agree

that it is to the extent that corporations and neocons try and infantalize the US voter..so they will not make any decisions or have any say or decision in how their country is run..or what values their families will have. The corporations do infantalize and support politicians who do .. so the corporations can write the legislation (drug laws, energy policy) and will have a free pass to do whatever they want with regulations and international relations.