HOW OLD IS ‘OLD ENOUGH TO KNOW BETTER?’

How old were you when you first heard it?

My memory says I was a seven year old who couldn’t field a grounder after my last ‘bad hop’ bounced off my face.

I wasn’t technically afraid of the ball, except I was afraid of what the ball might do.

When one of the baseball fields is called the ‘Rock Pile’, with a day job as a school parking lot, every hit ball had a bad hop.

That was way back in 1963, a year of bad hops.

The thing about asking how old is old enough to know better is the timing.

This is Christmas Time.

This is the time to show that Christmas Spirit, be a better version of yourself, and think about others.

How old were you when you said, ‘You’re old enough to know better’ to yourself.

For me, it was 1979.

I was twenty-five, working for EF Hutton, living in Brooklyn, and enjoying the hell out of watching city people on city sidewalks bringing holiday cheer.

The guys watched pedestrians navigate a slick spot on the sidewalk from the seventh floor, placing bets on who would fall.

The Christmas party was a three day affair with top executives one night, salesmen stock brokers the next, and finally the back office crew.

The ride home made me wonder how old I’d need to be to know better.

 

How Old Are Christmas Wars

You’ve heard of the famous WWI Christmas Truce?

From the Imperial War Museum:

 

Late on Christmas Eve 1914, men of the British Expeditionary Force (BEF) heard German troops in the trenches opposite them singing carols and patriotic songs and saw lanterns and small fir trees along their trenches. Messages began to be shouted between the trenches.

The following day, British and German soldiers met in no man’s land and exchanged gifts, took photographs and some played impromptu games of football.

 

WWI ended in 1918 with plenty of gassing, machine gunning, and trench digging in between holiday breaks.

At the end it was called ‘The War To End All Wars.’

Artillery cannons were kings in killing by sending bigger and bigger shells out of their smoking muzzles.

But it wasn’t enough, so more gas and more bullets.

And eventually airplanes.

Industrialized death didn’t sit well with everyone.

Neither did impromptu truces.

 

The truce was not observed everywhere along the Western Front. Elsewhere the fighting continued and casualties did occur on Christmas Day. Some officers were unhappy at the truce and worried that it would undermine fighting spirit.

After 1914, the High Commands on both sides tried to prevent any truces on a similar scale happening again. Despite this, there were some isolated incidents of soldiers holding brief truces later in the war, and not only at Christmas.

 

How Old Is Old Enough? Scroll Down

World War One

World War Two

Korea War

Vietnam War

Iraq War

Afghanistan War

Syria

Ukraine

Gaza

 

2024 is the One Hundred Year Anniversary of the start of WWI.

The images you just scrolled through are the debris left from wars past and wars present.

That we have present wars that look like past wars shows how much we’ve learned.

They all look like The War To End All War to me.

When I went to Paris I finished each day more tired than the last, but tired in different ways.

I was tired from feeling the weight of humanity, the work and time spent to build and preserve Paris.

It could have looked like any of these smashed country shots from the past 100 years and we’d look at it today through a fog of what it once was.

Why wasn’t Paris bombed flat?

 

How old do you have to be to see the results of nation battling nation?

There’s no age limit with rockets and shells and bombs in the air.

What is the thing about those pictures that stand out?

None of it would look like they do without the power of explosive munitions.

So ban explosive munitions?

When war is good business, and business is booming, what will it take before anyone listens?

Another hundred years?

Give an honest answer:  Could you hold a baby and tell them they will find parts of the world in 2024 that look shockingly like 1914.

Tell us how you can explain that, because I can’t.

What will it take before anyone listens?

When the boom gets too close.