When Did We Ruin Youth?

Youth are supposed to question, challenge, and rebel in order to improve things. Today's younger generations seem like old people.

I’ve been lazy.

For the last eight years, I lived in a typical suburban subdivision. The kind where people put as many hours of labor into their lawns as their day jobs. A subdivision that makes lawn irrigation a booming business.

In those eight years, I did little actual improvement on the house. Painted a few times. Fixed broken things. Had the deck resurfaced and stairs rebuilt. Stained it and the fence. Then, a flurry of improvements to get ready to sell.

But in the four weeks since I moved to the country, all that’s changed. My wife and I have improved almost every aspect of our new home. We have trimmed trees that damaged the roof and repaired the roof that was damaged. We cleaned the gutters that had been neglected for years. We replaced all the carpeting on the main floor, cleaned and stained the deck (it’s beautiful), added landscape and deck lighting, removed an old, broken hot tub, moved a large wood pile and stacked it neatly, had a fallen tree cut for splitting into firewood, had the septic tank pumped, conducted a two-day deep cleaning, repaired a broken fountain, installed wall savers on the doors whose knobs that dented or broken the walls behind them, fixed the broken gutter downspouts, cut and installed baseboard (that had been sitting uncut for years, judging by the dust on the board), and a dozen other smaller tasks. My self-imposed task list is only half done. Over the summer, we’ll build a gravel-and-stepping-stone walk over the dirt trails near the deck, paint the bedrooms and hall and the finished parts of the basement, complete the basement-finishing project the previous owners started, have some electrical work done to reallocate two 440 loads that have been permanently removed (the hot tub, for one), and finish moving in. (One bay of our garage is stacked six-feet high with our possessions.)

The point is, improving one’s environs is as human as breathing, yet the world at large seems to have given up. We hear that artificial intelligence is now the only way to improve the world, but that’s a lie. It’s a lie to say AI will improve anything and a bigger lie to say it’s the only improvement worth pursuing.

A Navy admiral once told a graduating class, “if you want to change the world, make your bed.” Doctor Jordan Peterson tells young people struggling with life to “clean your damn room.”

Making the bed and cleaning your room are minor improvements that will do more for the soul and the heart than greatest possibilities offered by artificial intelligence. To begin with, physical labor is authentic, not artificial. It is real, and its benefits are both undeniable and immediate. Moreover, in addition to improving the environment, physical labor improves the human mind, body, and soul (assuming the work is done for the greater glory of God.)

Try this: look around you right now. You will find at least on thing out of place, one piece of trash that could be picked up and tossed, one light bulb that needs to be replaced, one dog that needs a pet.

Now, stand up, bend down, and finish that job. Put the pen where it belongs, move the dirty dishes from the sink to the dishwasher, fold the laundry, toss out the stray paper, pet the damn dog! Do it. Now.

There. Your piece of the world is better. You burned some calories beyond the ambient rate. You increased your heart rate a bit, and it will fall to slightly below the baseline once you return to resting. You increased blood flow to every cell and organ in your body. You may have increased your life expectancy by milliseconds, but every decade begins with a single millisecond.

Now, I want you to look around at the world—the part that’s beyond your immediate control.

Is service better than it was 20 years ago?

Is your city cleaner than it was when you were younger?

Are the institutions stronger and more noble than they were 60 years ago?

Is the Catholic Church as revered as it was during the pontificate of Pius X?

Are you freer to do good than you were in the Reagan administration?

Another example: young people.

Adults have always worried about younger generations. Even Socrates said it.

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

Like many of us, Socrates attributed the common behaviors of youth to a particular generation. It’s a form of bigotry that we all succumb to. My guess is that Socrates, too, was a child who loved luxury, displayed bad manners, and showed contempt for authority. He was, after all, put to death over contempt for authority. So, I will now risk a Socratic error in talking these young people.

Unlike every generation since, at least, 400 B.C., younger generations today seem to want detachment and solitude rather than general luxuries. They are usually polite and respectful. And, most disturbingly, they tend show extravagant fealty towards authority rather than contempt. Last Sunday, for instance, when I stopped in a QuikTrip to use the bathroom and grab a coffee after Holy Mass, I saw two people wearing face diapers. Both were in their late teens or early twenties from what I could tell. Some authority had warned them to put the masks back on, and they blindly obeyed.

My wife rented a Jennifer Lawrence movie on Saturday about a young man from an affluent family whose parents feared he was unfit to leave home for college. The young man spent most of his time in his room, never learned to drive a car, never talked back, worked at an animal shelter to avoid contact with humans, studied hard, practiced the piano, and never, ever broke any rule. In the first half of the movie, Lawrence’s character worked to break him of his stubborn obedience, to break some rules, drink some alcohol, show a little rebellion. It was like pulling teeth.

While Hollywood exaggerates, the movie also rang true. All youth rebel, but these youth seem interested in rebelling only against youth itself. They don’t defy authority: they demand more. When I was young (and not so young), I delighted in mocking authority figures, even ones I respected. I made Reagan jokes. I cracked John Paul II jokes. I sat in the Radio room of a submarine days after the Challenger disaster and sweated out an entire page of Challenger jokes with two Radiomen. For us, it was never “too soon.”

When I make flippant jokes in business meetings, my superiors—close to my age—laugh. The kids cringe in fear, as if they expect to be punished for my disrespect.

This behavior of youth is not an improvement but, rather, a frightening trend. Youth are supposed to rebel. They are supposed to question the unquestionable and challenge authority. Young people should recognize they had no hand in making things the way they are and question whether things are as they ought to be. Unlike us old people, kids will have to live in the world for many decades. Likewise, they have time to recover from errors. The strategic principle, “if you’re going to take a risk, take it early,” was codified to keep grown ups from freezing when action is required; young people should do it instinctively and require no such aphorism.

In other words, we have raised at least one, possibly two, generations who were denied youth. Chronologically, they’re 20-something, but attitudinally, they’re 80-something. And that portends bad things for the future. One could assume that if the youth refuse to question, test, and challenge the status quo, the status quo will only increase. Our decaying, corrupt, ignoble institutions will get worse, not better, for lack of youthful vigor in challenging their methods and purposes. The hippies questioned the FBI and the CIA; today’s youth don’t. The hippies questioned the military; today’s youth don’t.

Again, this is not an improvement.

The same lack of challenge afflicts human thriving. Once upon a time, we made fat jokes, but today’s that’s called “body shaming” and get you fired, kicked out of college, or cancelled from social media. Obesity—the leading cause of chronic illness and poor life quality—is now considered beautiful and natural. Like our institutions, American bodies are becoming corrupted and weak. And, as with our institutions, young people seem to believe, “well, I guess that’s the way it’s supposed to be.”

Give me a rebellious generation that talks back to elders and breaks things, any day. I’m too damn old to challenge and break things for them—I’ve been doing that my whole life. At some point, I want to sit on my front porch and complain about these damns showing me no respect. I want to shake my fist and shout, “I was killing Commies for Christ when you were still nursing.” I want youth who seem vested in the world’s future, not subservient to its necrotic present. I want a generation bent on improvement, even that requires breaking a few eggs in the process. As always, old sticks in the mud will stop them from going too far. When the hippies went to far as young Congressmen and Senators, we rallied to elect Reagan, first in California, then across the country. When the Clintons went too far, we took away their Congress. We have plenty of old people to serve as a check on excess improvement. We lack young people willing to challenge the orthodoxy of the media, the government, educations, and the culture itself. All four need overhauls or demolition and replacement, but those with the energy and strength to tear them down seem interested only in tearing down statues and the means of creative destruction.

Christian Slater once referred to youthful generations as “a long list of famous, wild dead people.” We used to say things like, “I’ll get all the sleep I need when I’m dead.” A young banker I once knew sported a motto: “Live hard; die young; leave a good-looking corpse.” These sentiments, while shocking to some, indicate a healthy, vigorous youth. That vigor and riskiness, the compulsion to question and challenge everything, leads institutions and people to reflect on themselves. When kids tell their dad, “you’re putting on a few pounds,” dad gets angry. Then, he takes a long weak and blows the dust off his weight bench. When young people challenged the CIA and FBI, Congress formed the Church Committee to limit their activity and prohibit their cooperation.

Western civilization is on a fast path to self-immolation, and America is holding the Zippo. Teach your kids to rebel and encourage youthful disrespect for institutions and, even, elders. The elders, after all, got us in this mess while the younger folks were still in diapers. People my age allowed our culture to put on more than just a few pounds; we left the cultural institutions at the mercy of the crazies from our generations. We deserve a bit of disrespect—not for the things we stand for, but for the things we didn’t stand for. Until it was seemingly too late.

Let the young people live the words of America’s youngest president who shocked some on the right with this bold pronouncement in his inaugural address—words that can be said only by a younger person who believes himself invincible and that he has plenty of runway before him:

We dare not forget today that we are the heirs of that first revolution. Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans--born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace, proud of our ancient heritage--and unwilling to witness or permit the slow undoing of those human rights to which this nation has always been committed, and to which we are committed today at home and around the world.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

―John F. Kennedy

Let the youth rebel before it’s too late.