Children flourish when they engage with the wonders of nature. So, we tell them that all those miraculous creatures are facing extinction, and those enticing environments are doomed to destruction. Is it any wonder that young people turn to the virtual world? Why get too attached to things that are simply going to be destroyed? Environmental anxiety plagues youth, but we continue to torture their psyches with problems they can’t resolve beyond shouting the slogans that their teachers have dangled before them.
Children struggle to master the interpersonal skills that enable them to enjoy healthy relationships. A lot of talking and touching goes into developing those skills. But we tell children to fear interacting with people. “Others” could hurt them, or they could inadvertently harm others. We isolate them and fill them with fear. That might secure the future prosperity of the psycho-therapists and divorce attorneys, but it’s ruinous for the children.
Children feel secure when they have pride in their families and ancestors. No one would tell an African American child that his ancestors once sold their neighbors into slavery, or a child of the First Peoples that their ancestors exterminated the wondrous mega-fauna of the Americas, and yet some people think it’s fine to tell white children that their ancestors are responsible for all of the evil in the world. Children are born innocent and equal. No child should ever be made to feel guilty or responsible for what his predecessors did.
Children succeed when they understand that they have control over their lives and futures. Which is worse, to tell a white child that his achievements aren’t his own, but the result of “white privilege,” or to tell a Black child that his efforts won’t succeed because “systemic racism” will thwart him? Children need to feel confident they can control their lives. It gives their efforts meaning, and them a reason to strive to better themselves. Why work to improve yourself if your status as “victim” or “oppressor” is set at your first breath? The corrosive racism of Black Lives Matter, and its pernicious efforts to perpetuate the lie that skin color is the defining feature in every human experience, must be challenged at every opportunity.
Archeologists can see the burdens carried by people in the past written in their deformed bones. Today, we see the onerous burdens we laid upon our children in the deformed spirits of the adults they become: in the addictions; the broken homes; the single-parent households; the suicides; the failed marriages; the chronic health problems; the abandoned old, warehoused waiting to die; the self-isolation; the fear; the homelessness; the feelings of helplessness, of pointlessness; the depression; the economic hardship; the sterile lives. We deform entire generations of people.
The horrible things we tell our children might be defensible if they were even correct, but most aren’t; they’re distorted narratives fabricated by damaged adults displacing their own fears, guilt and inadequacies onto the world. It’s time to reject the perverted world views promulgated by academia and social activists and re-discover the cultures that produced the happy, healthy, independent, virtuous, self-confident children that we once had.
Our ancestors evolved cultures that led to unprecedented health, security and freedom for their people. In a sane world, we would honor their achievements and work to replicate their greatness. In a rational world, social changes that produce nefarious results would be rejected, but people today bizarrely work to destroy the very cultures that gave them the good things they enjoy. Madness! In their place, “progressives” create a new Dark Ages: a dystopia of intolerance, authoritarian control, pervasive anxiety, isolation, and the pseudo-community and tribalism of social-media mobs.
It would behoove us to remember the original form of “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” “Madness,” to our ancestors, was the inability to distinguish between good and bad.
Thoughtful comments are welcome at henrycarlyle@outlook.com
John Blasiak is a resident of Greenfield.