“Politics are usually the executive expression of human immaturity.”

―Vera Brittain

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When asked to look back over their life course, most people will describe middle-school as their most challenging time.

The agonies experienced by developmentally challenged young people — unleashed in semi-adult bodies and captured in forced intimacy with similarly impaired peers — are profound.

Emotionally, in our early teens, we have the grace, power, confidence and awareness of baby loggerhead turtles scrambling to get to the ocean before the seagulls get to them.

 We are equally vulnerable, and thus hurtful, embarrassing, awkward — think expelling gas in class after those terrible lunchroom tacos — and other painful moments can leave lifetime psychological tattoos

Here’s the real kicker.

The middle-school years are so powerful that most of us – that’s worth repeating – most of us develop our lifelong social-emotional coping model during that time.

That’s right. If we are not really careful, we can easily get stuck in middle-school gear for the balance of our lifetime.

In case you don’t believe it, take the test for you or a friend and see how many of the following traits apply: 

• You play life as a game of good guys & bad guys — We live in a dangerous world. It’s far too complex to afford the simplistic absurdities of “I’m good – you’re bad.” Watch senior Democrat leaders for perfected models of this destructive approach to power preservation.

• Truth is relative — Actually, most middle-schoolers understand the meaning of truth, they just chose to ignore it. Adult middle-schoolers are so practiced at manipulating, denying, or ignoring the truth that they can’t spell the word without a dictionary. That’s important because without truth, nothing works. Washington?

• Hyper-sensitivity — Today’s America is covered in three feet of snowflakes. Too many of us are just itching for something to be offended by so that we can turn on our hysteria button and seize the stage. There’s a secret problem with hyper-sensitivity. All that emotion wears you out and melts down into depression.

• Drama — Does anyone who made it through middle-school need any additional information on the negative echoes of divas and dilettantes?

• Power obsessions — Middle-school is the human equivalent of an anthill where all those in attendance are scrambling to get to the top. That this means stomping on our peers does not seem to be a problem for the hill-climbers.

• Feel-good addictions — We typically feel so bad in middle-school that we’re very vulnerable to countering the pain with a laser dedication to anything that feels good. Video games, drugs, pornography, overeating, underachieving, and screen addiction almost always get their roots planted in middle-school.

• Anger/hostility — Hurt, fear, loneliness, jealousy, and sorrow are powerless emotions. Who likes feeling powerless? Certainly not already wobbly middle-school students. That’s why their fallback emotion is anger — and so many of them become permanently attached to this emotion as a form of armor. That anger destroys the container that holds it gets lost on the thus addicted.

• Clicks — Everyone likes to be liked and the way to be liked in middle-school is to be part of the in-crowd. Permanent middle-schoolers never get over this approach to herding as an antidote to insecurity. 

• Entitlement and victimization — Nobody does these two things better than middle-schoolers. Except perhaps those who are permanent and thus more practiced middle-schoolers.

• Forgetting our morning maturity pill — Life is hard, demanding, challenging and intimidating. Fighting back and growing to our place of peace, productivity and prosperity requires that we be constantly rewriting and upgrading our maturity script. Until we do, it’s a good idea to imagine we have a prescription for a daily maturity pill and take it as prescribed.

 So how did you or your friend do on this middle-school screening device?

Years of intensive, empirical, peer-reviewed, and blind test-based studies have confirmed its superior accuracy. 

O = Smart conservative; 1-3 = Not-so-smart conservative; 4-6 = Not-so-smart liberal; 7-10 = Kamala Harris Fanperson.