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About Those Younguns
I was having a conversation with my wife this morning about all that ails this great country of ours. One thing that I think is a real problem, and you all tell me if I’m right or wrong, is the deference we give young people. I’ve heard it time and again: “Let’s listen to the kids!”
Might part of the problem be that we are listening to the kids too much? I mean look, they are dumb! I mean, we are all were dumb when we were young, coming up with dumb ideas, and doing dumb things. And as we grew older and learned from our mistakes and grew wiser. What got me thinking about this was a statistic on some podcast I heard about how many young people have a favorable view of communism. So what? Who cares? They don’t know what communism is!
Maybe part of our problem these days is we give young people too much credit, and they don’t listen to their elders.
Or maybe I’m just a curmudgeon.
Or maybe both!
Published in General
The thing about kids is their credulity. I like to tease (a family trait), but I’ve learned over the years to be careful when I’m teasing kids, because they’ll believe some of the most outrageous things they’re told. And they’ll continue in that belief for a long, long time.
It’s generally the left that says we have to listen to the children. I generally don’t for all the reasons you lay out. But the left finds minds easy to convince and then lets them do their talking for them.
You might be a curmudgeon, but you’re not wrong.
How favorably they view communism is indicative of how stupid adults are who taught them.
So, kids are dumb. But they learned it from dumb adults.
So, how do you deal with that?
On a more humorous note, I play this survival game with my 10 year old called “don’t starve together”. We’ve been playing for a few years now and something I’ve found super amusing is how indicative of real life survival it would be. At first, he was next to useless. I had to gather food for two while he stole eggs from monster birds to have a “pet” that grows up to kill him. Now, he’s better at killing monsters than me, but he can’t cook.
Yeah, kids are dumb about life. But learning is a fade switch, not an on/off switch.
Raise the voting age to fifty!
Or just raise kids who look to the older generation for advice. Even my kids don’t come and ask me for anything but money.
I suspect that has been true from time immemorial. It’s just that in the past, we didn’t give them any formal power. And that’s the way it should be. I never bemoaned the low voter participation of 18-25 year olds, in fact, I counted on it. Obama changed that because kids thought it was cool to vote for the first black president. Which it was. As long as they sink back into indifference, I’m OK with leaving the voting age at 18.
I also think the Baby Boomers are at fault for glorifying youth and refusing to grow old gracefully.
Agreed. Whatever you do, do not — I repeat, do not — listen to me.
. . .
On a more serious note, I’d lay some of the blame on the development of a distinct youth culture — something new in the history of civilization. As long as humans have existed, they’ve been complaining about those darn kids (as Aristotle did). But, until recently, the young were understood as partially formed adults; they didn’t form a political constituency, they didn’t have an identifiable culture, and they didn’t feel some mystical sense of solidarity merely because they happened to be born at the same time.
Seriously, the voting age should be the same age we hold people accountable as adults. So 18 is fine. We just need to ignore their nonsense. “G’way, kid, ya bothuh me!”
The young are credulous and they also hear what they want to hear.
Credulous: My father who tended to hyperbole once said, “Why there’s not one player in the hockey league with more than 6 teeth!” My young cousin took that literally. He was crushed to see picture of some hockey stars with mouths full of teeth.
Hearing what they want to hear: My mother once said, “Well, if you wait until you have ‘enough money’ to have children, you’ll never have children.” Well, that’s true because you never have “enough money” for all the things you would like to do for your children. What my youngest sister heard was, “Even though my husband and I can’t make ends meet with 2 paychecks supporting 2 people, I can have a baby, quit work, and somehow we can support 3 people on 1 paycheck.” (And no, the pregnancy was not an accident.)
This is what you get when you segregate youth from adults.
Young children segregated? Yes. Absolutely. But teenagers need to be around adults to start forming into adults.
With current laws, that is more like 26. You cannot vote until you are providing for your own healthcare.
There’s an idea: you can vote as long as no one else can claim you as a dependent on their taxes.
Or taking most income from the state or Federal Government.
Which is exactly want they were doing half a century ago — the late 1960s media’s fawning over the counterculture movement centered around the first wave Baby Boomers had a few roots (including the mass adoption of color TV making the colorful hippie outfits a magnet for the networks to try and exploit). But the main one was they saw the coming tide of Boomers as being a reliable source of progressive voters for decades to come, and made the angriest of the progressive counterculture types the Official Voices of Their Generation® so that a few people on the left represented all people born between 1946 and 1964.
Same deal today. David Hogg represents all Gen Zers, while Kyle Kashuv is derided and efforts are made to write him out of the political conversation into the future (where he’s not allowed to go to Harvard, despite having the grades to do so, while Hogg is admitted, despite not having the grades). The media plays up the wisdom of youths who already think like they do, in hoping others of their generation will simply march along like sheep, and that politicians will think that everyone under the age of 30 thinks that way (the long-term irony being that while the media of 50 years ago thought the Boomers would turn the nation into progressive Shangra-La, the progressives of 2019 can’t wait for those damn racist, sexist, homophobic Boomers to die off, because they’re the ones they see as having put Trump into office).
When I think back on how dumb I was in high school, in college, for the first 10 or 15 years of my work life, I just shake my head now. Of course I was too busy being in school, partying (eh, not that much), learning how to do a job, meeting people, having fun, yada yada. Then I got married, had a kid, and actually started thinking about stuff. Hmmmm.
Now, with many years of experience, I read a lot and think about what I read and see. And I look back and shake my head.
If you’re old enough to die for your country in the military, you’re old enough to vote, buy liquor, buy a handgun, and provide for your own insurance.
If people in our society are too immature for any of these things, they’re too immature for the rest. Perhaps kids are maturing slower than in the past and 18 is too young, now. Whatever the case, pick an age and be consistent.
Or how about this idea? Continue to accept 18 year-olds into the military. You can’t vote, buy liquor and guns, etc., until you’re 21 (for example), or earlier if you’re active duty military or have been medically discharged due to wounds suffered in combat.
True, but it’s not only that the left cynically likes the youth because they’re easy to convince and make for sympathetic mouthpieces. “That’s not fair!” is both the catechism of the left and the cry of every adolescent known to man. This is not a coincidence, it’s a shared worldview. They’re simpatico.
Both.
My daughter gets really POd and annoyed when she determines that I have a point.
That is very true. Add to that “You just don’t understand!”
How many times have you heard someone speaking on a complex and/or technical subject begin by saying, “We feel that …”? I always want to yell, “[redacted] what you feel. What do you think? Or can you think?” A culture that values feeling over thinking when it comes to problem solving will naturally listen to kids who are not ready to think seriously, but who can feel as much as an adult.
I have long believed that we take kids way too seriously.
I feel like you may have a point.
I do, but when I’m wearing a hat, no one notices.
Well. Kids set the tone in Latin America for years. What could go wrong?
And in China, during the glorious Cultural Revolution.
Reminds me of something written by the British actress and writer Fanny Kemble, who spent much time in the US (starting in 1832) and was an acute observer thereof:
The dignified and graceful influence which married women, among us, exercise over the tone of manners, uniting the duties of home to the charms of social life, and bearing, at once, like the orange-tree, the fair fruits of maturity with the blossoms of their spring, is utterly unknown here. Married women are either house-drudges and nursery-maids, or, if they appear in society, comparative ciphers ; and the retiring, modest, youthful bearing, which among us distinguishes girls of fifteen or sixteen, is equally unknown. Society is entirely led by chits, who in England would be sitting behind a pinafore ; the consequence is, that it has neither the elegance, refinement, nor the propriety which belongs to ours ; but is a noisy, rackety, vulgar congregation of flirting boys and girls, alike without style or decorum.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/28665.html
I’ve been spending a lot of time reading the opinion pages of college newspapers. I have been amazed by the lack of maturity of these kids, even at the most prestigious universities, compared to their counterparts from a few decades ago.
I’m overgeneralizing, but my impression is of a generation that has been mal-educated, convinced that they are all emotionally disturbed, and who have no conception of how the world works.
All the evidence I need to convince me that the young should not be trusted with the vote is the singular fact that the Democrats want to lower the voting age to 16.
That was enough for me too.