Hey! What About Logic and Reason? Didn’t You Cover That?

I used to think I was born at the wrong time. Now I think I was born at the right time. Missing the Great Depression and WWII, catching the entirety of the 60s and 70s, and now beholding what appears to be the beginning of the end of society as we know it? I’m thinking the timing was perfect.

I was born during a ravaging blizzard in an upper East Coast naval base that apparently no longer contains a hospital, nor any history thereof. To this day there’s still no clear documentation regarding the hospital’s two addresses. Ten years ago I traveled back east to search the records myself, only to find the long-standing conflict of facts (does no one care?). Yet, there was hope; the local records office told me the case of the missing hospital, along with its address, was still open. The townspeople usually put it on the docket every few years if things get too slow.

So, my birth records are ambiguous, leaving me to wonder which of two New England states I can legitimately call my hometown.

A woman without a state. Maybe a woman soon to be without a country.

Why is the timing perfect? Well, because I was born at a time when the exuberance of the 50s could still be felt in the lifestyle of the American family. Things were pretty good for kids. I went to elementary school where we learned to read, solve math problems, write essays, compete in spelling bees, conduct science experiments, create beautiful pieces of art, learn about our history, and accept challenges to be “Top Dog” of the week. The “Top Dog” award meant you got a ginormous gold star next to your name on a big Top Dog chart in the back of the room. I lived for Top Dog status.

And there were rules in the classroom. Disrupters had to sit in the corner for a while, but rarely were they sent to the principal's office. That was about as bad as it got.

Yes, I remember the terrible things. JFK, Lee Harvey, Martin Luther King, Kent State, RFK, Sirhan Sirhan, Vietnam, the nightly news footage of planes bringing caskets back home, Janis and Jimi and Jim, Watergate, dressing up like a hippy in fourth grade … all of those things.

But I was a kid. I had no idea of the implications.

Despite my youth, and probably by the grace of God, I somehow got the concepts of logic and reason. Even as kids, we were taught to do our own research, to reason things out, to try and see the logic of either/or questions, to posit a hypothesis and run an experiment to test it, and all sorts of other learning exercises.

The aim? To learn how to see clearly, and therefore think clearly. We were taught to look for and recognize that there are logical and reasonable downstream outcomes of the decisions we make today.

Kids don’t think like that anymore.

Kids today are taught to memorize slogans, to believe distorted renditions of history put into a false and sinister context, and aspire to activism. Any kind of activism. Just act. Change the world. Make it different. Break with tradition, doubt history, ignore human nature, and maintain a venomous level of anger. Oh, and climate change. Always ¹climate change. Such an ethereal and ungraspable project to swipe at.

Anyway, a big segment of the kids don’t know very much about history or logic or reason or beauty or the sanctity of life … or God’s love.

Of course, I know this doesn’t apply to all kids. But it doesn’t take that many delusional and angry activist "youngers" to undermine the life-affirming building up and maintaining of a civil society that provides a sense of safety, community, possibility, and hope … in perpetuity.

Again, they don’t know very much despite four years of college (and now a state of indentured servitude via outrageous levels of student debt). They’re just not thinking.

My daughter just graduated. Over the four years she was in school, almost every class had some bent toward encouraging activism, even for those courses you wouldn’t expect to be connected to a political ideology. In those cases, the topics trended toward stories of oppression, judging history through the lens of today’s dominant college campus ideologies.

²Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.

Human existence is highly nuanced, if that makes sense. Human nature, as it is, needs guardrails (³like the fruit of the Spirit), but nuance can also be understood as a fundamental quality of human existence.

But no, not today. Many of the kids are quick to judge the oppressors based upon shallow and mostly false proclamations of wrongdoing. I call the strategy “Plausible Misinterpretation.” They set someone up, someone who isn’t a conniving bloodthirsty activist, with an impossible test of their “rightness,” and then pounce on them. Like the trap of misgendering. How ridiculous is that? Okay, sometimes it’s obvious. But it often is not! Not at all … and yet you’re expected to get it right or pay an unreasonable price.

Fortunately, my daughter is my daughter and she sometimes listens to me. And she made it. She graduated. She is in good shape.

But she has no capacity for logic or reason. This means that, despite her complaints about her current situation, her health, and her suddenly nonexistent state of employment (meaning unemployed), she still makes the same choices today that will ensure there will be little movement forward tomorrow.

Yes, I’ve talked with her. I’ve had the “If you do this, then this is what will likely happen” talks.

Doesn’t help.

The schools didn’t teach her how to think. The schools didn’t teach her how to reason. The schools instead taught her a narrative and tried turning her into an angry activist … on my dime.

To give her credit, I'll tell you my daughter was an excellent student with strong study habits. She's very knowledgeable in her field of study, earning a 3.8 GPA.

So she has knowledge. Knowledge without wisdom … yeah, it’s a gap.

At least she doesn’t have any student debt. And as it looks now, I’ll have plenty of opportunity to fill in the gap. She keeps sending me Trulia links to houses that have ⁴ADUs.