Aren't We Getting a Little Too Old for This?

Before I set down to write this blog, I was planning to do a story about the response to celebrity chef Paula Deen's announcement that she has Type 2 diabetes in light of her cooking those infamously yummy southern dishes on Food Network. But that will have to wait for another time because tonight I saw the following story from Hawaii News Now about a notorious clothing shop owner in Honolulu accused of deliberately vandalizing street signs to promote his store.

Justin McCoy is the owner of UDOWN, an urban clothing retailer in Honolulu, Hawaii who has become more famous--or should I say infamous--for his vandalism advertising all over Hawaii and apparently here on the West Coast. I have seen UDOWN's logo of a letter U and a down arrow on stickers plastered all over the campus of Mt. San Antonio College, where I am currently a part-time student majoring in web design. I have also seen QR stickers, those pixillated barcodes that you scan with your cell phone which usually point you to a mobile website for some promotion or sale, all over Mt. SAC as well, but mostly in the corner of a larger promotional ad for Pepsi or some other mainstream retailer. Because L.A. is tagger country, I have unfortunately come to expect such "slap tagging" from tagger crews and renegade vendors wanting to make a name for themselves.

However, McCoy and UDOWN have been accused of slapping a giant QR sticker over a freeway sign above the busy H-1 Freeway in Honolulu, the major highway on the island of Oahu, endangering the lives of motorists who would stare and be distracted by it and of state highway workers stopping in the middle of traffic to remove the sticker. McCoy insists that he and UDOWN do not condone such illegal and life-threatening activity, but his company profits off it anyway by selling t-shirts, posters and DVD's of the incidents. In a previous interview for Hawaii News Now back in 2006, McCoy declared that:

"It bugs us to see so many (stickers).  It was cool a couple here and there but it's gotten out of hand.  We're working on it, giving less stickers out to kids. ... I'm not going to lie to you.  I do like to see them but I don't want people to get hurt putting them up."

But the day after that interview, McCoy and two UDOWN employees were caught in the act at the Hawaii State Capitol in downtown Honolulu, throwing a giant wad of stickers at the bronze seal of the State of Hawaii that hangs over the main courtyard. In the above news video he admitted he and his crew were there, intending to strike the seal with the wad in order to make a gong sound--and catch it all on video. He also said he didn't hurt anybody or anything, and thus the police let him go.

McCoy, who is in his 30's, admitted he's getting a bit old for these childish stunts but it's something that's been in his blood since he was younger. But all signs point (pardon the pun) that he won't stop the stunts as long as he stays ahead of the law and isn't personally caught in the act.

Thus the question which is the title of this post: aren't we getting a little too old for this?

In March I will turn 42 years old. Although I am still single, I am also at an age in which one is typically married with children, perhaps some of them teenagers. With age comes experience, and hopefully maturity, and I realize that there are some things I did in my teens and 20's that I no longer do in my 40's... or at least I shouldn't.

I recently cleaned out several boxes of old papers, tapes, notebooks and junk that I have kept since my undergrad days at Chapman University. Revisiting some of the cartoons, art projects, student newspaper articles and campus radio programs I did 20 to 25 years ago, I am embarrassed at how terrible some of that stuff really was and kept asking myself why I hoarded them for so long. Some items and mementos are real gems, but most of it is "junks". Five boxes of junks were sized down to one box of gems in less than two hours, with the rest sent to the dumpster with absolutely no regrets.

Anyone who knows me at church knows I have a somewhat offbeat sense of humor, which can be compared to David Letterman, Groucho Marx, a young Steve Martin or even Ernie Kovacs. I love absurdist humor and comedy sketches based on puns and wordplay. However, I am not like that 24/7. There is a time to be funny and a time to be serious, especially at work. And I don't have the tolerance or intestinal fortitude to be exposed to the low-brow, crude humor that now dominates morning radio shows and prime time television.

Twenty years ago I was a hardcore fan of The Ren and Stimpy Show because I loved its surreal animation and low-brow, anti-establishment humor that seemed so refreshing against the sanitized, pro-social twaddle that Hanna-Barbera, DIC Entertainment and Marvel Productions were cranking out for Saturday morning TV. I was also a lonely, angry and confused college brat desperate for attention and busting all boundaries to get noticed, all in the name of individualism, academic freedom and "finding myself". Today I am embarrassed that I went through that phase and held onto it for so long. Finding my ultimate worth in Jesus Christ and what He did for me on the cross has wiped out all those former things and brought me to a whole new level of life that is fulfilling and meaningful.

Sadly, others my age are still trying to hold onto rebellious youth. Seth MacFarlane, now in his late 30's, enjoys a large following as the creator of the adult cartoon shows Family Guy, American Dad and The Cleveland Show, as well as from his expletive-laden rants at other celebrities and the establishment. Charlie Sheen, in his late 40's, was fired from the CBS sitcom Three and a Half Men in 2011 because of his erratic behavior and drug problems, but he has banked on that by remaking himself as an brash, uninhibited anti-hero who tells it like it is and is persecuted for it.

And then there's Jim "The Poorman" Trenton, who is almost 60 and has never really been the same since being fired from the KROQ radio program Loveline back in 1993. A year later he hosted a TV variation on KDOC called The Love Channel, which was dropped the day after he appeared live on-air in the nude in a desperate attempt to save the show's falling ad revenue. Working as a board operator at KDOC at the time and 24 years old, I found it rather creepy a man in his early 40's was still acting like a a junior-high kid.

The apostle Paul wrote about growing and maturing in our Christian faith in his first epistle to the Corinthians:

When I was a child, I spoke and thought and reasoned as a child. But when I grew up, I put away childish things. Now we see things imperfectly, like puzzling reflections in a mirror, but then we will see everything with perfect clarity. All that I know now is partial and incomplete, but then I will know everything completely, just as God now knows me completely. (1 Corinthians 13:10-12)

There is a time to speak, think and reason like a child, and that is in childhood. If by the time we reach adulthood and are still acting like a child by never taking responsibility for our actions, blaming others for all the bad things in our lives, playing the persecuted martyr, believe there are never any consequences for our actions, or that somebody will always bail us out of disasters of our own making, something has gone terribly wrong. And unlike Angelica Pickles, either the toddler Rugrats version or the teenage All Growed Up variation, we can't "blame the big people" anymore.

As I get older, I see this spiritual immaturity in the body of Christ. I find that Christians who keep praying to God for a "financial breakthrough" are often financially irresponsible and want that breakthrough to fund their next big splurge (James 4:3).Those holding out for a miracle healing from a chronic disease like diabetes or high blood pressure won't make the lifestyle changes necessary to control them. Others desperate to get married so they won't be lonely are filling that God-shaped void in their heart with relationships, often inappropriate or dependent, instead of turning to God Himself. Having gone through all of those things myself when I was younger, I speak from experience and not from an ivory tower.

There is a difference between being child-ish and child-like. A faith that is childlike is like when a little child puts his or her trust completely in Mommy or Daddy to provide, protect and love them unconditionally, knowing they are always looking out for them. I personally have taken some pretty hard knocks and setbacks, including my own diagnosis with diabetes six years ago, to finally forge that childlike faith and accept that God's will for my life is infinitely better than my own. And in doing so, many areas of my life have seemingly straightened themselves out, opportunities have opened up that I never thought would, and I have learned to be content with a little or a lot (Philippians 4:11-13, 1 Timothy 6:6-10).

That being said, I am preparing to return to Hawaii next month for the annual Great Aloha Run and make contacts in the hope of ultimately relocating to Honolulu and making a new beginning career-wise in the Aloha State. If it's God's will for that to happen, it will happen. If not, Hawaii will still be a great place to vacation once in a while. And I have no need or desire to pull off stunts like vandalizing freeway signs or hitting bronze seals to make it happen.