Robert Bly has given us a painful and scathing analysis of our present American society. He titled his work The Sibling Society. Bly confesses he began this work in a lighthearted vein. He employed poetry, fairy tales, and legends to highlight the contradictions he noted all around him. However, he soon discovered that he was into some really serious business. Essentially, what he uncovered was that we are all swimming in a tank of half-adults. For Bly, Elvis and Woodstock were watersheds at which time all parents lost their children. That is to say, the society in which we live cannot be considered paternalistic or materialistic. Authority, boundaries, limits, and traditions are gone. Adolescence starts earlier and lasts all the way to age 35. Even then we have our ability to mature to th…