Trust, Doubt, the Individual in "Balloon" and "Angry Men"

Inside a locked room, twelve men seem to be having a lot of deceptively deep conversation; man to man, as it were. Outside, exposed to the entire city of Paris, Pascal only says a few words to the balloon, (other than "You must obey me and be good," and "Balloon, come here! Balloon, stay there!") and the other dialogue is scarce.

It's almost as if anything "real" that you would want to speak of would have to be said in private, in a locked room, among equals. But then, maybe this isn't right either; children have a lot of truth to say about life around them, even if they don't have the language to express it. Are they prevented from expressing truths by authoritarian adults? Teachers, parents, persons of authority who have a mentality that youth can't have an opinion because they haven't got the experience to back it up.

Well. If the world worked that way, we'd end up with silent adults with a lot of experience, but no idea how to translate that experience into solving modern problems. Oh, wait.

Rose and Lamorisse seem to be on similar wavelengths about children. How do these thoughts relate? Maybe they're both commenting on authority, but I also think that compassion and respect are a factor, too. Perhaps Angry Men and Red Balloon are warning viewers (readers) that disincluding people different from you is dangerous, that being a callous 'adult' with a mind melded for use by the institution is dangerous. Personally, it's kind of mind-numbing to think that we all have a say in the construction of humanity. That's a lot of responsibility. As a young(er) person, a woman, insert-minority-demographic-here, would I have been trusted, in the 1950s, to carry that weight?

To move across even shakier ground, why or why not? Because men (up to that point) had ruled the world? Because white, savy, successful/business-owning men had ruled the world? Is it other people we don't trust, or is it that we don't like change? Doubt is a strong emotion in Angry Men, and an underlying question in Balloon; in both stories there is the story arc of the individual versus society, and how powerful (dangerous? wonderful? both?) that situation can be. Justice is, after all, carried out in Angry Men*, and even though Pascal's balloon has died, he's comforted by the entire balloon population of Paris rising (literally) with him. Are these events made to make a pleasant-ending story, or were they purposeful in saying something more along the lines of, "This individual made a stand. It worked out/didn't work out, but the standing up part was a great thing."?

* IMHO, I think it's still possible the boy could have killed his father. However, I agree with the jurors' logic about the old man and old woman; they weren't reliable witnesses, and this could be enough to set the boy free in a court of law. I think Rose wanted us to root for the boy as an abused underdog--well, fine, but logically, he had as much evidence against him as for him by the end of the play.