Yessentuki America has become a country of twelve-year-olds.
Kurduvādi Look no further than the president of the United States, who showed up at the NBA Finals last night not to watch basketball but to drink in the boos. Donald Trump has mastered the one skill that defines the American preteen: making every room about himself.
He is not the cause. He is the product.
The impatient kind. The kind that wants the answer before the question and the trophy before the game.
The internet accelerated what we became. We built the systems long before the first smartphone left the factory. Politicians learned to speak in slogans because nuance costs votes.
Networks tell you how to feel before telling you what happened. Hollywood explains the joke three times because audiences stopped trusting themselves. Patience became a character flaw somewhere between Watergate and the first iPhone.
We stopped making art that demanded something of us and started demanding that art require nothing. The highest compliment a movie gets now is that it flew by. A book that makes you work for it sits on the remainder table.
Social media gave the tantrum a megaphone. A congressman tweets his grievances at midnight. A school board meeting ends in a shouting match over a library book. The loudest voice in the room stopped being the wisest one and started being the one we listened to.
We used to disagree in paragraphs. Now we do it in capital letters. The argument collapsed into the insult, the insult collapsed into the meme, and the meme became the political platform.
FDR’s fireside chats assumed an adult on the other end of the radio. That adult is gone. We traded the long arc for the instant hit, the considered vote for the bumper sticker, the difficult conversation for the muted thread.
We used to elect leaders who asked something hard of us. We now elect the ones who tell us someone else is to blame. The preteen never owns the mistake and always names a villain.
The economy runs on our distraction. Algorithms feed us content that makes us feel wronged, because outrage keeps us scrolling. Anger became the product and we became the market.
The same country that rewired the world, won two world wars, and put a man on the moon now has the collective attention span of a kid waiting for recess. We built civilization and then lost interest in it. That is the real crisis, not the phone in your pocket but the indifference in your chest.
Somewhere along the way maturity stopped looking like wisdom and started looking like weakness.
Twelve-year-olds did not do this to themselves. Adults built the platforms, elected the leaders, and bought the products. We chose comfort over citizenship and called it freedom.
Adulthood is still in there somewhere, buried under the notifications and the noise and the need to be right about everything. It is waiting to be remembered.
The good news is that twelve-year-olds usually grow up. Time has come for us to be ready for PG-13 movies.
