Thursday, February 14, 2013

The Kids are All Right. But...

What's the matter with kids today?  Why are they just sitting there taking it from the old 'uns like me?  If you ask me, they should be in the streets digging up cobblestones.

Instead, they are out voting for Obama and they are all in favor of bigger government.  That's what The New York Times's Sheryl Gay Stolberg found out when she went to the liberal college town of Missoula, Montana.
Sam Thompson, a 22-year-old environmental studies major at the University of Montana here, considers himself “fiscally conservative” but opposes cuts to Medicare; he expects to need health coverage when he grows old. Aaron Curtis, 27, a graduate student, admired Jon Huntsman, a moderate Republican, but could not stomach Mitt Romney’s opposition to same-sex marriage.
But really, what do you expect?  Here's a kid who's presumably spent his entire youth incarcerated in a government child-custodial facility, and about the only adults he's known have been the unionized, tenured, government functionaries we call "teachers." What else would he think?

The whole point of the Gramscian "long march through the institutions" is to get first crack at the young 'uns and "form their minds" as they used to do in Jane Austen novels.

But there is one thing to remember.  It's one thing to ram your ideology down the throats of the young.  The ultimate question is: will it work?  When the young heads full of mush get out in the world will they find that the ideas and the ideology that the tenured government functionaries have dished out actually work in their lives?

That's where we are with the millennials.  Their liberal teachers have taught them all the liberal PC stuff about the wonders of big government and the horrors of the patriarchy.  They have made girls into enthusiastic rowers and degreed them to a fare-thee-well.

And they have filled them full of propaganda about saving the planet and honoring traditionally marginalized minority communities.

But what's the point if there are no jobs for people with degrees in environmental studies?  What if the heavy lifting on the environment was done 40 years ago?

What if the government runs out of money for education and health care?  Do those millennials have a backup plan?

The point is that the ruling class of educated liberals have socialized the young generation to be nice obedient liberal drones, to be perpetual teenagers, in the words of Mark Steyn.

They have also socialized the young 'uns in "expressive individualism."  That's a fancy word for creative artist, and the notion goes back to the Romantic movement at the turn of the 19th century.

Expressive individualism is a fine thing, except that it's not very social, and humans are social animals.  The creative artist presents his--or latterly her--artistic vision to the world and then stands back waiting for the hosannas.

Only the world doesn't give a damn for his or her artistic vision.  In the classic Romantic narrative, the Romantic hero thereupon commits suicide, as in Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther.

Obviously, to take a Kantian approach, this is nonsense.  If everybody gave up and committed suicide where would we be?

There is worse.  The whole cult of the creative artist is a canard.  The most creative thing that almost anyone can do is to marry and create children and then create healthy, useful adults out of those children.  One in a million gets to be a famous artist or a famous scientist or a famous politician.  For those lucky few, immortality is obtained by individual creative endeavor.  But for the rest of us, immortality is our children.

The Big Lie of liberalism is the idea that the mainstream of courting, marriage, career, children is a boring cop-out for the conformist people of the racist, sexist, homophobe 1950s.

Of course, if you plan to be a supernova, then the conformist mainstream is nothing but a red dwarf.  But what if you are not cut out to be a supernova?  Then the only way for your life to mean something is to marry, have children, and leave this world with a goodly clutch of grandchildren.

That's something that the millennials will shortly be learning, good and hard.  Writer Sarah Hoyt's son already understands how hard things are going to be.  She writes:
I was talking to my son the other day and he said “Everyone in my generation has flat given up.  The height of our ambition is to someday have a job that actually allows us to live independently.  There’s no grand dreams for us.”
It's a pity that decades of liberal big government are going to make it really hard to live a mainstream life of career, children, and family.

I'd say that if the millennials have any grit in them at all, they will be really angry when they finally figure things out.

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