Curfew: (n) a regulation requiring a person to be home at a certain prescribed time.

The startling thing about wisdom is how much sense it makes if you’re not running from reason.

If you’re in a mood to listen and hear, the gems that can be picked up from the desert floor of human interaction is mind-boggling.

But the minute you’re convinced that your aspirations, your lifestyle or your pursuits are supremely energized, then your ears will close and your mind will flap in the breeze.

Such is the case with the American adolescent.

I was once an adolescent, so I feel qualified to speak on the issue. On top of that, for some reason I decided to birth babies, who unfortunately became adolescents—and once again, I peered first-hand at the lingering problem with these creatures.

An adolescent is self-destructive because an adolescent believes that truth is better acquired outside the home, outside the faith, outside the school and outside common sense.

So anyone who tells an adolescent about an exciting adventure suddenly becomes the “John the Baptist” of the high school hallways, declaring the “way of the Lord.”

Nowhere is this any more true than in the arena of curfew.

If every living human were completely honest, they would proclaim: “Nothing good is ever done after twelve midnight, unless you work the third shift making ice cream at Ben & Jerry’s.”

Everything that happens after midnight is drenched in iniquity, covered by darkness and surrounded by the kind of rascals who feel it is their privilege to “party all night and sleep all day.”

So when a Mom, Dad or any authority figure sets a curfew sensitive to that border into the entrance of Dante’s Inferno, it is based on a concern that when fun is done, we need to run.

Because after we’re done with all the eating, the movies, the bowling, the partying—then we are in the car, driving and looking for a new location to continue an event which should be over.

Everyone knows this.

Even if you caught a teenager speaking bluntly to a friend, this adolescent, too, would have to admit:

“At midnight, the coach turns into a pumpkin and the slipper drops.”