Grow up, Prince Harry. You're 27 years old. That's not a kid anymore. That's a grown man. Boys will be boys, but men should act like men.
The sordid affair of the naked photos taken of Prince Harry at a Las Vegas party - now with allegations of cocaine use being bruited about - could easily be dismissed as the antics of an idiotic kid if Harry were 18 or 19. Instead, they just mark this prince-not-so-charming as one more member of a generation that sees nothing wrong with prolonging its adolescence ad infinitum.
Not long ago, I overheard a woman about the same age as Harry saying that she was going to someone's 30th birthday party, and that the girls (not women, mind you, even though 30 is no longer a girl) would do the cooking, while the "boys" played video games.
Boys? Video games? Previous generations didn't continue playing with their childhood toys well into their chronological adulthood. Even the much-maligned baby boomers, whose foibles are regularly trotted out and scrutinized in the media, can't be accused of that. At 30, they hadn't the slightest interest in playing with the toys they'd played with at age 12. It wouldn't have occurred to them.
It used to be, too, that adolescents couldn't wait to grow up, to take on the mantle of adult life. Now, it seems they are in no hurry to move out of childhood - ever. When you hear that "boys" of 30 are still playing video games just like any 15-year-old, you wonder what 40 is going to look like for them.
Much blurring of long-established lines is going on here, for at the same time that 20-somethings are behaving as though they're entitled to be big babies forever, actual children are being treated as though they're adults.
The New York Times last Sunday revealed in a gushing interview with 14-year-old Maude Apatow, daughter of Judd, that she has more than 62,000 followers on Twitter.
"Some people say: 'Maude Apatow is my spirit animal.' I get that a lot - They tweet it to me," she says in an article entitled She's 14, Going On 140 Characters.
Their spirit animal? A 14-year-old kid? One hopes those 62,000 folks are all fellow 14-year-olds, and that supposedly mature adults are not uttering gibberish about Maude being their spirit animal.
Hopefully, thousands of adults are not hanging on this child's every Twitter utterance, such as, "It was really uncomfortable when I watched Beaches with my best friend and she didn't cry," or "Are black bands on your braces gross?"
Few people seem to act their age these days, or are treated as they ought to be at their age. So it's useful, particularly in Prince Harry's case, to have a quick look at what 27-year-olds were doing in other eras, when they - and the world - thought of themselves as adults.
According to museumofconceptualart.com, at 27, Henry David Thoreau was just heading off for his two-year hiatus at Walden Pond. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space. Memphis millionaire Frederic W. Smith established Federal Express. Ernest Hemingway published The Sun Also Rises. William Morton, a dentist in Boston, set the stage for the science of anesthesiology when he discovered that ether knocks people out.
Harry's going to be celebrating his 28th birthday in a couple of weeks, so let's check on the lives of famous 28-year-olds of the past, shall we?
The Museum of Conceptual Art says that at 28, "the Danish physicist Niels Bohr published his revolutionary theory of the atom. French novelist George Sand published her first novel, Indiana. Dr. Ludwig Zamenhof of Warsaw invented the artificial language Esperanto. British physician Thomas Wakley began publishing The Lancet."
Meanwhile, Prince Harry, on the cusp of 28, cavorts naked at a party at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas, while commoners of his age play video games.
One of Maude Apatow's devotees wrote on Tumblr that she "speaks to my soul." That's OK if this fan is 14, but if he or she is an adult, then someone really needs to introduce this person to the great writers, poets and thinkers of all time. It's in their work that you find stuff that speaks to your soul, not among the vapid tweetings of some teenager.
One of those great poets, William Wordsworth, wrote: "The child is father of the man." If Wordsworth were alive today, he'd have to revise that to: "The child is father of its overgrown self."
Prince Harry, and others of his generation, might want to reflect on another piece of literature, the King James Bible, in particular, 1 Corinthians 13: 11: "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
