A friend of mine commented that everyone has a bit of a mean streak in them. A destructive, vindictive, greedy sliver that one occassionally takes a little guilty pleasure in releasing. I was drawn to the thought that children are proof of this. One doesn’t have to teach a child to misbehave. But misbehave has a connotation of “mischievousness” that isn’t accurate with very young children. Very young children are experimenting. They’re curious. They don’t know that this is acceptable behavior and this is not. I wonder if the mean streak my friend was talking about is actually a vestige of childhood. Maybe it’s the remnants of the child we used to be, just wanting to experiment a little.