A monk’s not deemed ‘an Elder’ through hair that’s turning grey.
If he’s just matured in age, he’s deemed ‘matured-in-vain’.
—The Dhammapada - Chapter 19, Verse 260
I recently reunited with a group of friends I haven’t seen in years. They looked sharp in their suits and ties, talking about the careers they had pursued and the children they had gone on to raise. I couldn’t believe how much they’d all grown up.
I remember what degenerates we were on college nights like it was yesterday. For example, one year, the bathroom in our dorm was on one end of the hall, while two of my friends lived down the other. On nights after drinking, J was too lazy to walk down the hall, so instead, he’d pee in bottles or jars or whatever was within reach when nature called.
The morning after one such night, I stumbled into their room to inquire about breakfast and found J dangling a Ziplock bag full of dark yellow liquid over his roommate’s head. B sat with his arms crossed in a chair, mid-conversation with another friend of ours. I made eye contact with J as he lowered the bag, and it morphed to fit the shape of B’s head. Without so much as turning around, needing no clarification of what just happened, B calmly said, “That’s gross, man. It’s still warm.” J simply giggled as he raised it up and plopped it down again repeatedly, the sound of urine sloshing about in B’s ear. College normalized this kind of behavior it seems.
On a separate occasion, we were at the beach, with eight of us standing in a circle and chatting. Mid-sentence, a trickle of liquid streamed down J’s leg and moistened the sand between his feet. There was an awkward pause before his girlfriend said, “Are you peeing!?”
The world his litter box, J simply replied, “What? That’s what you do at the beach.”
She went on to marry him, and now they have a child.
These are the parents of America’s youth today. As I keep that in mind, I look back on the role models I looked up to in my own childhood, wondering what kinds of pasts they had while I blindly saw them as authority figures. Surely, those generations who emerged from the sixties through the eighties have stories of their own, buried beneath careers and fancy clothing.
Degenerates raising degenerates: that’s what’s going on here. And someday I’m sure to join the ranks, keeping secrets from future generations behind a facade of maturity.