I played all sports growing up. Well, let me adjust that. I played the big three American sports growing up.

Obviously, I played baseball or I wouldn’t be where I am today. But I also would show up, with or without friends, to parks with outdoor courts and played pick-up basketball. I would gather together a group of friends, sometimes as few as three and as many as 20, find an open field and play football.

We would play until dark, go home and come back out and play again. There were rules, but no referee to stop the game.

But that doesn’t mean the games didn’t stop from time to time.

I was in an Lyft Line with a minister once and she reminded me that young boys between 11 and 16 are some of the most aggressive and insane humans going. That the combination of maturity, acceptance among your peers and general ignorance can lead these minds to make decisions they shouldn’t.

We view our times with the vision of the moment, momentarily forgetting all that came before and its influence…or lack thereof.

So we forget that many of the children we see making horrible choices and the repercussions of those decisions are less than 100 years from being in structured systems to prevent their ideas from taking shape.

Simply stated, at the start of the 20th century, a large number of young boys were working farms, following their fathers in their chosen trade or already enlisted to serve in the military.

They certainly weren’t sitting inside comfortable chairs, starting at screens and shouting at someone in a similar position hundreds of miles away.