One of the good things about being a grown-up is that most adults learn a certain amount of perspective. You learn to take the long view of things.

Think back to when you were a teen-ager. Every little thing was a crisis. The smallest of life’s hiccups was going to affect you forever. A single zit on your forehead was going to mean people would be calling you by a cruel nickname for life. When your girl/boyfriend broke up with you, it meant you were going to live a lonely life and die alone, probably in a house filled with old newspapers and way too many cats. A less-than-stellar grade on one math test was going to doom you to a life of minimum-wage grunt labor.

Well, you found out that wasn’t true, didn’t you? So many of the things you thought were going to ruin your life at 15 – or, for that matter, make it all beer and skittles — didn’t. In fact, you don’t even remember most of them now.

You’ve learned to take the long view. You’ve learned that yes, actions have consequences; sometimes the consequences are very, very tiny. Sometimes they’re enormous. You learned to delay gratification, or you learned that sometimes what you want isn’t necessarily the best thing for you to get, consequence-wise.

Of course, some people don’t learn that lesson. They live their lives by the sacred principle of “hey, it seemed like a good idea at the time.” We all know people like that, whether it’s the neighbor whose marriage blows up because he can’t keep his pants zipped or the brother-in-law who is constantly broke and hitting you up for a loan, “just this one last time.”

Most of the time, people like that really don’t affect you much. When the neighbor gets divorced, it’s no skin off your nose. It’s a pain in the butt to have to turn your brother-in-law down for that loan, but doing so doesn’t really hurt you on a personal level.

That’s not always true, though, because sometimes people who can’t take the long view want to do things that ultimately will hurt everybody. In North Dakota, they can do that by seeking to put their short-term idiocy into law by coming up with ideas for statewide referendums.

Take the people who want to get rid of property taxes in North Dakota, for example. Blinded by the state’s temporary status as the site of an oil boom, they’re bound and determined to set the state up for a massive financial meltdown a decade or two in the future.

Yeah, things are fat in the oil patch right now. People are streaming into the state to fill myriad open jobs. Money is flowing like, well, oil. North Dakota isn’t going to have to worry about budget problems for a few years, maybe even decades, if the most optimistic productions about the Bakken Formation prove true.But here’s something everybody better keep in mind: It’s not going to last forever. Fossil fuels are a limited resource. The western part of the state may be sitting on a huge amount of oil, but it’s not an unlimited amount. It doesn’t even have to totally run out for the oil boom to become nothing more than a memory. The amount available simply has to dwindle enough that it becomes too expensive to pump.

And that day will come. Not today, not tomorrow, maybe not in our lifetime, even. But it will come. And when that happens, the oil companies and all their workers, and all the people who provide ancillary services, will leave skid marks as they flee the state to look for better opportunities elsewhere.

But if North Dakota kills property taxes, the people who are left are going to be in a real hurt bag. That’s going to happen no matter what, but if the state’s voters are struck with teen-ager-with-no-view-of-the-future syndrome, the pain is going to be much worse. And everybody’s going to realize that rather than thinking like the oil boom was going to last forever, it would have been more prudent to sock that money away for the time when it no longer flows from the ground.

Frankly, if the measure passes, the state will have acted stupidly.

The same is true, although the hurt is more immediate, for the measure that would force the University of North Dakota to keep the Fighting Sioux nickname.

Now, the motives of those who so badly want to keep it remain a mystery to me. I can’t fathom how anybody could think a logo is so important. I guess those who want to keep it would feel good if the measure passes, in the same way that a small child feels good after eating too much candy – until the bellyache hits. But results, not motivation, are the issue here.

And the results could be dire. Other teams won’t play the Sioux. UND will become an athletic pariah. And the rest of the country will be confirmed in its general impression that North Dakotans are hicks, too dense to realize when they’re doing something that may feel good to a few people but will hurt the state financially and, some would say, morally.

Quite frankly, that either measure is on the ballot kind of makes me glad I’m not a resident of the state any more. I can join the rest of the nation in shaking its collective head and wondering what is wrong with folks on the upper great plains.

So for those of you tempted to vote to either kill property taxes or keep the Fighting Sioux nickname, I say this: Grow up. Think about what you’re doing. Think of how it will affect things down the road. If you do that, it’s pretty obvious that it is a bad idea. You may get what you want in the short term, but it’s going to be very, very bad in the long term.

Any grown-up can see that.