ROTHENBURGER — Remembering the perils of youth

COLUMN — I was reminded yesterday of the stupidity of youth.

So, you’re saying, just another routine day, was it?

Well, true, I’m often reminded of the stupidity of youth, my own in particular. Yesterday, there was the Molotov cocktail incident.

Kamloops RCMP were called to a place where somebody found an abandoned Molotov cocktail, or what certainly appeared to be one. The bomb squad was called in to explode it and no harm was done.

There could have been plenty of harm, though. Those contraptions are dangerous, and potentially deadly. There’s a good chance it was put together by adolescents doing some experimenting. I’m not saying youth are the only ones who would do such a thing, but there’s a good chance, and it would ruin the point of what I’m saying if it was a couple of 80-year-olds fooling around.

When I was a kid — I can’t remember how old, but around 10 I think — a couple of other kids I knew were making Drano bombs and tossing them at turtles in a slough. Those things made a terrific blast when they went off. If one had detonated with anyone near it, somebody would have been killed.

They were stupid to be doing that. I, on the other hand, was stupid not to tell them to stop, though it wouldn’t have done any good. I have a memory of wishing they wouldn’t throw their bombs at the turtles, but I don’t remember if I said anything about that, either.

After exploding a few cocktails, they tired of the game and went home, and so did I. I never saw them do it again but that doesn’t mean they didn’t.

I did lots of dumb things in my youth. I once had a fight with a neighbourhood kid just to see what it was like. We threw some punches and rolled around on the ground. It did accomplish one thing — I found out I wasn’t much of a fighter.

Another time, I and a couple of buddies let the air out of a bunch of tires in a parking lot.

In my teens, cars became problematic. I got ticketed for speeding. One night I pulled up behind an ex-girlfriend on the highway and clicked a flashlight with red paper covering the lens on and off several times — she pulled off the road thinking I was a cop, and I tore by, thinking I was pretty clever. And, of course, there was the night I and three other guys got blotto on bootlegged vodka and rolled my Dad’s truck.

The point I’m trying to make is that youth is much overrated, a perception I cling to more tightly as the years advance. It’s also a fact that young people today aren’t any stupider than they were when I was a kid — they just have different toys. And, I suppose, to take the point further, no age group has a monopoly on stupidity.

But adolescents are certainly good at it. They stage girl fights just so they can record it on their smartphones. They throw parties when their parents are away and literally destroy houses. And they post things on social media nobody should ever know about, let alone the whole world.

I’ve read about Smarty-snorting contests (seriously) and inhaling booze through their eyes (seriously). Remember the ‘neknomination’ drinking game that swept university campuses a year ago? People died.

The experts say young people do stupid things because their brains aren’t quite fully developed (or, at least, their brains function differently than when they get older) and their hormones are raging, causing a combination of high risk tolerance and bad judgment. They haven’t learned fear.

And when they get together, they’re particularly anxious to show off. Dr. Amir Levine, an adult, child and adolescent psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the division of child and adolescent psychiatry at Columbia University, explains: “The brain of an adolescent is very different from the brain of an adult. The brain goes through huge changes, initially it grows and then it shrinks.

“It basically undergoes what we call pruning, which means that the brain becomes more efficient and it does away with neurons that it doesn’t need.”

Early on, though, neural pathways are abundant, making young people more willing to take risks.

“The daredevil brain, it goes into even hyper-mode when adolescents are in groups, and in general because testosterone causes more aggression,” says Levine.

To be fair, it doesn’t just happen with people. Experiments have shown that young mice do stupid things, too. They drink more alcohol than adults do when they’re in a group.

For the most part, I’d never want to be an adolescent again. But then there are times I’d like to go back 50 or 60 years so I could do things differently, better, smarter. Then I realize that no, I couldn’t, because kids are kids, and they can’t help it.

Mel Rothenburger can be contacted at armchairmayor@gmail.com. He tweets @MelRothenburger and is on facebook.com/mel.rothenburger.7.