B. U. G. S.

I got my driver’s license at the age of fourteen.

Backward old South Carolina let fourteen year olds get drivers’ licenses.

Fourteen is an age branded in history.

Before the Berlin Wall was built and millions of East Germans were allowed to pour into West Germany — I was THERE — an unaccompanied child who escaped from East Germany to West Germany had to be a certain age before he was considered old enough to make that decision for himself?

Guess what that age was?

Fourteen.

In Medieval times, if a child were the heir to the throne and his father had died before he was of age, what age was he first considered old enough to assume the throne himself?

Fourteen.

When does America’s Extended Childhood begin?

America’s Extended Childhood begins when you enter the ninth grade and become a high school freshman. Then you become a high school sophomote, then a junior, then a senior.

And after you finish being a high school senior and you graduate y9u become a COLLEGE freshman, a COLLEGE sophomore, and so on. Four more years of extended childhood begin.

When does all this begin. When do you begin your Extended Childhood as high school freshman?

Well gee willikers, you become a high school freshman at age fourteen!

What a coinkidink!

Decades ago there was a major campaign to raise the driving age from fourteen to sixteen in all states. One national ad showed a boy with a really nasty look on his face saying, “I’m fourteen and I can drive and you can’t do anything about it.”

Ain’t objectivity wonderful?

The Northern newspapers had spoken, so Fashionable South Carolinians began a major push to raise the driving age to sixteen.

They had hearings about raising the driving age to sixteen and I was the only person there who signed up to testify against it.

The other side, the side of Fashionable Opinion, was full. The usual Episcopal and Presbyterian ministers were lined up to demand the Latest Fashion. All those who pop up for Independent Thought as represented by Modern Opinion were there.

My problem, as usual, was that I had read the facts. Drivers from fourteen to sixteen had a very low incidence of accidents.

Statistically, if you wanted to cut the death rate on the highways in half, you would not concentrate on fourteen-year-old. To really reduse death on the highways, according to the actual numbers and not the New York Times, you wold not allow any male between the ages of 16 and 25 to have a driver’s license. The most dangerous drivers, as testified by insurance rates, were males from 16 to 25.

Can you imagine any legislator voting for a bill like that and surviving the next election?

So the witnesses lined up, clerical collars and all, to demand that 14 to 16 year olds be deprived of their licenses.

I was about 20 then, but I knew it wasn’t only unfair, it was silly. I caught hell for it.

Many people tried to explain the facts of political life to me. I was just a kid. What could I know about political reality?

Actually, I had graduated from the university at age nineteen. When they tried to explain the political facts to me I was a graduate instructor in, of all things, POLITICAL SCIENCE. Never once did I explain that to anybody. Facts did not matter to them, and I had known that long before I turned twenty.

Ene then I didn’t think the authorities were too smart. Not to mince words, I knew they were incurably stupid before I was in my mid-teens.

So why did I do it?

I knew I was NOT a cleric with a backward collar who had to make his peers know he read the New York Times too.

I knew I was NOT a state legislator who had to run for reelection.

Bob was just one more person, and he had one thing to contribute:

While everybody else was saying what their backward collars or their suburban status or their Mature Practical Politics required them to say, one person could tell the truth, the truth everybody knew.

I wonder when that mind-set started? I mean the mind-set that saw reality and didn’t give a damn if anybody thought I was being mature or practical or not.

That mind-set was there long before I entered the university at age sixteen and promptly wrote a letter to the college paper saying how silly fashionable college opinion was.

It started before that, thought I don’t remember exactly when

Maybe it started when I was fourteen.