Whoa! Don’t take this wrong but the world is getting too adolescent for me to stand anymore. Now, I will understand if you reply, “Hey, it’s my turn to sound off, for a change ... .”

Well, sorry, kid. Remember? I’m the one with the column!

You know, we worry about nuclear bombs and extremists of all kinds, but what we really need to worry about is the influential place of adolescents in our world. And I’m not just talking about the celebrity adolescents, like Britney and Paris and Lindsay, and such, though the way they dominate the news you would think they were the Second Coming.

And I’m not just talking about teenagers. Many of the ones I know have more sense than their grandparents. I’m talking about the millions of people, often very influential people, who take 30 or 40 years to mature beyond the age of 15. Often they haven’t even made it by then. And there’s nothing new about that.

For instance, it is no accident historically that many of the biggest threats to world peace, like Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Attila the Hun, Genghis Khan, and company were all under 50 in their most influential years. They had to get it all in early, because they came from nations with life spans of 35 or 40 at the most. Still, ever since, no one seems to have questioned the ground rules they set. The history of the world has been made mostly by folks who are still living or eagerly acting on an adolescent mindset.

Heaven help us, nothing seems to have changed except the lifespan.

It’s adolescents who control the weapons, and the debates, and the politics. Or at least, it’s folks who think like adolescents, and have adolescent appetites and values.

And this is true, no matter what side you’re on in almost any issue. Prolonged adolescence is the biggest danger this world faces nowadays, from any point of view.

You could see it in the face of Hussein (Iraq) at the peak of his power. (He grew up pretty fast after he was captured and sentenced to death, not that that solved any problems.) You can certainly see how tickled Ahmadinejad looks as he announces some new nuclear development of Iran that will set the teenagers of the world at each others’ throats. (Are we having fun yet?) Sure, maybe it will impress the world (if Britney isn’t on the front page that day), but it also brings us one more step toward an inevitable future of universal destruction and suffering.

But adolescents don’t think about that.

I don’t think it was an adolescent mindset that created nuclear bombs, or finally decided to drop them on living cities. I think it was adult desperation. But I do think it is adolescence that guides much of the decision-making in North Korea, and in Palestine and Israel, and in China and Russia, and in the Balkans, and, yes, indeed, in Washington, too.

You can see adolescence in Osama Bin Laden’s childish tantrums to make the world go his way, if he has to kill everybody including his own faithful to make it happen. There’s prolonged adolescence in al-Sadr’s attempts to control all things Baghdad, and in wildly polygamous men indulging their juvenile sexual appetites, and in urban gangs of guys who keep looking for family love and connections they never get at home.

I think it is adolescent to want to live to be 150, as we keep hearing about these days. Once you’re past 70 you don’t exactly see the appeal of that one.

And it’s adolescent to buy 5,000 square feet of living space for one small family, and especially over and over again in second, third, or fourth houses. (Guess I’ve been watching too much “House Hunters.”) It is adolescent to blow hundreds of thousands of dollars on weddings, birthday parties, and competitive social whoopee. And it certainly is adolescent of our entire culture to focus so heavily on TV and computer violence, sex, and killing games.

I also find much of the religious activity nowadays to be somewhat adolescent, including the television preachers who assure their followers that if you take Christ into your life, you’re honest-to-gosh gonna get rich. And you can see adolescence in the words of silly religious believers who simply cannot seem to find any working connection between their brains and their beliefs.

I also find the preachers of atheism to be remarkably adolescent in their sanctimonious attempts to destroy other peoples’ deepest religious faith. They often look like gleeful little boys getting the biggest kicks of their lives, shocking the stupid old folks, with “outrageous” ideas that have all been thought and said long before their lifetimes.

Oh, come on — grow up, will you?

Maude McDaniel is a Cumberland freelance writer. Her column appears on alternate Sundays in the Times-News.