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The Most Hopeful Thing
I struggle daily with the news — the slide of what was a pretty decent way of life into a society that is decadent and under threat of dissolution. But then there is this: Ruby LaRocca, a 17-year old from Ithaca, NY, wrote an award-winning essay for The Free Press outlining her prescription for the youth of today.
I hope the essay is real, that there is a young woman in Ithaca, NY, who asked her mother when she entered her sophomore year of high school to let her home school to get a better education. I hope there is this young woman who does, in fact, read old books; who memorizes poetry and learns ancient languages; who slows her pace of reading, writing, and thinking; who has learned to conduct herself in public; who dramatically reduced her use of the phone. Because if she exists there is hope — hope for our future society.
That she exists will not prevent the destruction that societal decay will bring. But it points to survival of something that is worth the effort to survive. Ruby has a mind that will survive the gulag, if she must. That she might have to is a condemnation of all of us older citizens — our failure of stewardship and self-discipline. She is already seeing the need for solidity that the digital age and it virtual everything — books, movie, money –cannot provide. She will survive the Great Disappearance that a de-energized electrical grid system or a malign government could impose.
The best we can hope for, us superannuated spendthrifts of our forebear’s legacy, is that Ruby and others like her — hopefully some even older than her — take the reins of society quickly. That, or hope that on the curve of decay we remain on a shallower, not steep, slope.
But Ruby shows the future will be fine. For someone. And some day.
Published in General
I am always comforted and inspired when young people show promise.
Great post, Rodin.
I just find myself wondering if she’ll nonetheless vote Democrat like most young people.
I love Ruby’s essay, and applaud her approach to life, but I also wish she would lighten up just a bit. I hope that she occasionally stays up past 9:07.
What a remarkable essay! She seems mature beyond her years and wise beyond the years of many who are decades older. Her checklist of recommendations is remarkably comprehensive and provides a useful template, both for parents and teenagers. If she hasn’t listened yet to Jordan B Peterson, it’s all the more remarkable because she has arrived at a similar destination.
Thanks R for highlighting this. It is quite a breath of fresh air and hopefulness. I intend to forward it to all my progeny and siblings! :-)
I sent that essay to my youngest daughter who is in her last semester of homeschooling. She thought it was a good essay, except she wanted to make it clear to me that she hated reading. Unless she’s reading about volleyball. Or some graphic novel. “I need pictures!”
Ah . . . homeschooling has been quite an adventure for us. And we’ll be done soon. Neither of my kids was this ambitious, but I am absolutely certain that homeschooling was better for them than being jammed into a government classroom.
Indeed, she would have missed original Star Trek when it first aired!
If you’re looking for more Rubys (and Richards), you’ll find a decent number at Hillsdale College. Reading old books, memorizing poetry, and studying old languages doesn’t end with homeschooling for the ~1500 students there. Maybe Ruby will find her way to Hillsdale. I like to say it is one of the last outposts of civilization.
Might be worth noting here that Kat Timpf of Fox News and a NYT/Amazon-best-seller new book, is a Hillsdale alum, magna cum laude in fact.
Reminds me of the young lady at Oxford who used to be a Ricochet member. She knew about seven languages, had traveled extensively, and was a martial arts expert. She seemed atypical of her generation, to say the least.
(Can’t remember her name/handle — anyone?)
Something about travel, wasn’t it?
I have to admit there was a whiff of “come on, you’ve got to be kidding me” as I read the essay. I hate to be so cynical, but this, for example, was hard to believe:
Aha! KirkianWanderer.
Sometimes it might take me a bit, but I come up with things eventually.
Actually that took me less time than remembering Dr Susan Lewis on ER was played by Sherry Stringfield.
@kirkianwanderer, you still with us??
Profile says inactive, most recent post or comment was May of last year.
Homeschoolers are weird. But typically in a nice, wholesome way. It does seem . . . questionable, but . . . well, I’m not dismissing it entirely.
Sadly, cynicism is justified by hard experience. The essay is real, but are the things described in it real? I hope so. But one of the hallmarks of the current moment is all the deception. It is rampant, and apparently tolerated, in places it never seemed to be rampant and tolerated before — newspapers and magazines, scientific publications. I don’t know what due diligence The Free Press did before it made its award. I hope they did it well.
That did sound pretty esoteric at first, but then two names came to me: James Joyce and John McCrae. Maybe not so far out after all.
Thank you, @rodin, your thread gave me some solace during my nightly 3:00 A.M. – 4::00 A.M. sleeping break.
You know of course how homeschooling is burgeoning. We were driven to it in the ’80’s, on our return to California. But now all eight of our grandchildren are homeschooled, even the two-year-old – her siblings love to teach her everything they can. And downstream of homeschooling, things like Classics high schools are becoming popular. One just opened its doors two weeks ago, just five blocks from our house. My concern is whether or not these people will be filling the positions that need to be filled, soon enough and in sufficient numbers, to stop the avalanche into the abyss. For every Hillsdale, there’s a Harvard.
I don’t think our movement is too little. Bud Light, Target, Hollywood, etc. demonstrate that Western values are still out there in a big way. The decision to homeschool requires families to forego the present western standard of a two – income household. The disintegrating economy makes that situation all the more difficult, and for single – parent (or single – grandparent) households, it’s already nearly impossible. But those growing number of family units who make the decision to homeschool are not likely to vote in favor of their, and their children’s demise.
Are we past the point of no return? Are we now in a position where the elite hold enough power so that majority are cowed into silence, and those who resist are jailed? I pray that we aren’t. But that’s one big thing that keeps me awake at night.
She has been off line for a bit over a year. She graduated from Yale (w/ an MA), and is now at the University of Chicago graduate school of History. Given the near Herculean level of effort of her course work (which she shared in the PIT), I was amazed that she ever had time for bantering with us. I suspect the Covid lock downs and easy access to yammering at a bunch of fellow nerds was what she was looking for and now it’s no longer required she hasn’t been around.
Plus I suspect the level of effort for a thesis is probably grueling.
Thank you for bringing Ruby into our lives. We are all enriched by learning about her and from her.
@rodin, repeating my comment of last night, thank you very much for introducing us to Ruby. I just posted a piece on my blog about her essay and it can be accessed at https://jimgeorge.substack.com/p/meet-ruby-larocca-17-year-old-symbol for anyone who might want to take a look at it. I copied out more of her essay than I intended to — if I had not wanted to be cautious and respectful of her and her publisher’s IP rights I would have gone ahead and just copied out the whole piece, it was so excellent. The more I studied her essay, the more I could understand comments like that of @charlotte as it really is hard to believe there could be a person this young, especially in this age of living almost totally virtually through electronics, this brilliant and this driven and this accomplished intellectually. I especially appreciated your comment #17 and sadly have to agree with you 100% about the degree of rampant deception in our society today. The only minor quibble I might have with your statement is to note that not only is much of this deception tolerated by many of our institutions, in some, if not many, cases it is outright encouraged. As an example of how this works on people, as I was about to hit the publish button on my blog, I hesitated (despite that old adage that he who hesitates is lost!) and tried to find Ruby on Facebook, even though she sounds like the last teenager who would spend one nanosecond on that colossal timewaster. I found nothing on her personally or her family but there were some very interesting comments by people about how exceptional her essay was and how accomplished she sounded as a person. Thanks again, Jim.