Losing before the first shot is fired

I was at a dinner party on Saturday night and we were talking about the economy. One of the guests opined that, like in the 1930s, this Great Recession was here to stay and recovery will only come about as a result of war. While I personally agree with this sentiment, as did some of the other guests, one guest’s comments struck me as being particularly prescient. “There’ll be a war,” he said. “But we’ll lose because we won’t fight. Our young people just aren’t up for it.”

It’s true, because our young people can’t tell the difference between winning and losing and have been socialized from their earliest years to be passive. Even though we often hear about horrendous violence among teenagers, as many are in possession of no small amount of rage, the overall feminization of the educational curricula at all levels results in churning out a cohort of young people who are barely able to get through a job interview without a grief counselor on hand. On a near daily basis we learn of yet another teenager who was ‘cyber-bullied’ into committing suicide. Several states have even enacted new laws to protect individuals from cyber bullying, even though most states’ harassment laws already proscribe such actions. What’s more physical bullying at work or school is on the rise because those being bullied have never learned strategies to deal with aggression. Add to that most schools’ silly “zero-tolerance” policies for violence and you have an iron clad guarantee that the bad guys will always win.

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“How did we get here?” you may well ask, and the answer is a series of insidious actions and non-actions on the part of parents, the educational system and society in general to yield what Mark Steyn calls the “culture of the Eloi” (named after those creatures H. G. Wells Imagined in his story “The Time Machine” in the year 802,701). Only problem with Wells’s tale is that he missed the appearance of the Eloi by 800,690 years. They’re here today-- right now! Most parents turn their children into little monsters by the time they are ready for JK, imbuing in them a sense of entitlement and exceptionalism that will dog them all the days of their lives. How often have you been in a public place where a young child has behaved in a totally inappropriate manner without the parent so much as attempting to mitigate the kid’s tantrum? It’s almost as if parents are afraid to say “no” to their offspring, lest there be hard feelings on the part of the child because they would much rather be a their child’s friend than parent. Schools only serve to strengthen these traits, focusing more on the importance of self-esteem than on the importance of learning. Achievement in primary school is seen as the right of every child, whether they actually achieve anything or not. Consequently many children advance through the grades on the basis of social promotions rather than proficiency in the curriculum. The curriculum, such as it is, has been dumbed down to such a degree that children are largely ignorant of history, correct grammar, spelling, rudimentary mathematics and other important disciplines. In sports, more and more children are deprived of failure, which is a basic ingredient of success. If you don’t know what failure feels like, how can you tell when you’ve succeeded? And if you’ve never experienced failure, then you also haven’t learned anything from your mistakes, which is really all that failure is, a learning experience. Many adolescents’ organized sports preclude winners and losers—even something so basic as keeping score. And in the end, everyone gets a trophy! Finally, a large number of young people enter early adulthood without understanding how their political system works and what their responsibility as a citizen entails. They all know their legal rights, to be sure, but do not understand where those rights come from, or the path through which they came into existence, much less being prepared to stand in harm’s way to defend them. Many young people imagine that their rights originate with the government and are perfectly happy to live in a nanny state. They also tend to follow the strictures of political correctness adopting at any point whatever limits this may place on their way of life. As such, I am afraid my friend is right on both counts, there will be a war and we will lose that war because as a culture we no longer have the will to prevail, much less the will to win.