When Whitney Houston sang, “I believe the children are our future,”¹ I thought, maybe not. Yeah, they’ve got a better chance at being the future than old people, but it’s not a lock. My progressive friends often argue that we must trust the young people. They do not, of course, trust their own children, checking their phones behind their back to make sure they’re not Snapchatting with old men, buying fentanyl, or sharing naked photos of their friends. But you gather up a few hundred of these kids and put them in tents, and suddenly we trust them with solving the Middle East. I enjoy young people’s politics. There’s a lot of blaming the system. I hate the system. I’m 52, have never managed a single employee, and don’t read my taxes before signing them. Which I’m pretty sure means that I’m not responsible for them. See? I won’t even learn the rules of the system. Young people have been right on civil rights, Vietnam, South African apartheid, climate change, and underpaying newsboys. They were right in Tiananmen Square and the Arab Spring. But young people have also been horrifyingly wrong. They were wrong in 1917 St. Petersburg about the Bolsheviks, in 1975 Phnom Penh about Pol Pot, in 1979 Tehran about Ayatollah Khomeini, in 1930s Ivy League schools about how Stalin was a pretty good guy, and in 1990s American universities about the awesomeness of Fugazi. Which is fine. You get to be wrong when you’re young. Most protestors haven’t taken Econ 101. Some of them haven’t even cheated on their high-school boyfriends yet. They haven’t had to wrestle with the complexity of real-world tradeoffs. They believe in ally-ship, where groups with very different interests will pretend to get along (Queers for Hamas!) to face a common enemy but in some way that’s not immoral Kissinger-ian realpolitik. But adults shouldn’t tell kids that they’re right just because they mean well. Because if we don’t do our jobs of being the system they march against, they’re going to right back to spending all day staring at their phones. 1 Yes, George Benson recorded “The Greatest Love of All” first, for the 1977 Muhammad Ali biopic The Greatest. Here’s him singing it to kids on Sesame Street. Kids who probably then blew up buildings with the Weather Underground. Thank you for paying to read my column. Wait: This is for the people who didn’t pay? Then I owe you nothing. You are the ones contributing to the end of my career. If you want to pay an exorbitant amount of money to get one extra post a month – which often won’t even be that good – upgrade to a paid subscription here:
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Friday, May 3, 2024
The Kids Aren't ALL Right
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