American youth signals a future of decay and dissolution
They are preoccupied with puerilities and devoid of wisdom with zero interest in acquiring it.
It is commonly said that a nation’s youth is its future. If that is true, the United States is in peril.
Its youth celebrates freedom of speech by silencing opposing views.
It celebrates equality by accentuating tribalism.
It celebrates emojis and shuns the alphabet.
It celebrates drivel and trivia while scorning the march of the mind and wisdom.
As Goethe put it, “There is nothing more frightful than ignorance in action.”
America’s ill-educated youth is incapable of faithfully executing the United States Constitution and preventing the nation’s accelerating self-ruination.
Comparing America’s young with young James Madison more than two centuries ago underscores the shocking retrogression. Mr. Madison, having read and digested every book worth reading at Princeton, was elected to the Continental Congress at age 29. He served in Virginia’s House of Delegates at age 33. At age 35, he penned Virginia’s landmark Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments. He architected the U.S. Constitution, penned a large portion of The Federalist Papers, and orchestrated the Bill of Rights between ages 36-38. During that interim, Madison authored President George Washington’s Inaugural Address, the response by the U.S. House of Representatives to which he had been elected, and President Washington’s response to the House response!
As John Quincy Adams eulogized, after Mr. Madison died he became the brightest ornament in the heavens always on call to help political figures navigate their ways between Scylla and Charybdis.
Yet America’s youth has no clue about who James Madison was, except perhaps the name of a university in Virginia.
America’s decline and fall are irreversible. There are no cultural, educational, religious, social, economic, scientific, or political dynamics pushing the nation back from the precipice. The question is not “if” but “when.”
Do I sound like Cassandra? Remember her true prophecies were disbelieved.