Throughout history I imagine that a lot of people had witnessed apples falling down from trees. And I’ll bet that if you had asked one of those people, hey, why do those apples fall down like that, they would answer with a shrug,
‘Cause apples do that.
Asked and answered.
But it took one man- presumably one very annoyed man, still reeling from a blow on his head, courtesy of a fallen fruit- to ask,
But why do they do that?
And then eventually define gravity.
Simplicity is an illusion- even the most straightforward concepts, the most commonplace situations, the most fundamental beliefs, can be transformed into a tangled mesh of complexity and confusion by a one-worded question:
Why? Where? How? What?
Thanks to Sir Isaac Newton, we now understand that there exists an unseen force which pulls objects to the earth’s surface- and most of us are satisfied with that explanation. Because if we dare ask the question one more time, if we dare inquire, But why is there gravity? Where did it come from, then we find ourselves smack-dab in the middle of Quantum Physics, Chemistry, and various branches of Mathematics. Confusing places. Scary places. Places where few people would ever want to find themselves alone.
And so most of us are satisfied with the simplest of answers- How do birds fly? They flap their wings; Where do human beings come from? Adam and Eve; Why does Uncle Nathu wear a dress? ‘Cause he’s freak! We’re satisfied because we don’t want to look too close. We can’t. We know how messy it can get.
So in one of the TV programmes I was watching a long time back (CNN? BBC?), after watching the sentencing of Nathaniel Brazil, the then 13 year old kid convicted of the cold-blooded murder of his teacher, Barry Grunow (sometime in the year 2000 I suppose), I felt satisfied. The prosecutors wanted a stiff sentence, and they got one- 28 years. Another murderer evicted from society long enough for us to forget his existence. Case closed. But as many have noted before me, and many will after me, this murderer was barely into his teens. And yet he was tried as an adult- an ‘adult’ being, any person who hasn’t reached their 18th birthday.
Incidentally, there are many reasons why we have separated this society into adults and minors- one of the main ones is that some people have concluded that it takes eighteen years for a human being to develop the mental capacity to make influential and complex decisions. And so it takes 18 years for a person to be able to vote in an election, 18 years for a person to (legally) buy a pack of cigarettes. And if a person is over the age of 18, it’s a crime to have sex with anyone who hasn’t quite made it to that milestone- no matter how ‘mature’ that particular minor might seem.
At 18 you are an adult, you are mature enough to realize that every decision you make has consequences. Before that, you are too naive, too underdeveloped, to make complex decisions.
And so the inevitable question comes up, How can you try a fourteen year old kid, be it in the USA or anywhere in the world, as an adult?
Well because what he did was so bad, so disturbing, that, even though he may not have understood what he did (which I doubt), he has to pay. He did a man’s crime, now he must do a man’s time.
And, for now, that simple answer will satisfy me. I know it is an illusion, but right now I don’t have the strength to ask any more questions. Who knows where they will lead me?
Maybe one day I’ll have the balls.
