Not proud, wanting to be, but just not feeling it. That sums up the mood of young adults in America these days. The numbers don’t lie, the youngest two generations are significantly less likely than older ones to say they are proud to be an American.
The moral failings of today’s America – the self-absorption, coldheartedness, the mean streak, fear and loathing of foreigners, intolerance of difference, indifference to suffering – are plainly visible to all who choose to look. The youngest among us see it clearly while many of the rest of us divert our gaze.
Perhaps the aged are not as wide-eyed as their children and grandchildren, less anxious to see what’s in front of them, nostalgic for the way things used to be, longing to go back. The youngest generations have only ever known America as it is right now or was very recently, leaving them greatly disillusioned by what they are inheriting.
Maybe affluence dulls the senses of those with more yesterdays behind them. The U.S. economy keeps chugging along, lavishing a few, furnishing comfort and security to many. Those with the most tomorrows ahead of them, however, are feeling neither comfortable nor secure. The elusiveness of steady work paying a livable wage combined with the spiraling cost of housing, health care and child-rearing have them feeling vulnerable, feeling like the American dream is beyond their grasp, a feeling incompatible with pride.
What douses their feelings of national pride the most has to be that nagging sense that our country’s geriatric leaders don’t seem to give a thought to the challenges facing the youngest generations, don’t give a damn what they think, don’t hear what they say, don’t appear to care what becomes of them. In this regard, young adults in today’s America have so very much in common with their generational counterparts at the very beginning of the American experiment.
A quarter-millennium ago, 56 men – two of them but 26 years old, another 17 in their 30s – told of a prince whose character was marked by every act that may define a tyrant. One who refused his assent to laws, obstructed the administration of justice, made judges dependent on his will alone, deprived many of due process of law and trial by jury, excited domestic insurrections among them, erected a multitude of new offices and sent swarms of officers to harass the population, obstructed laws for the naturalization of foreigners and refused to pass new ones to encourage their migrations, cut off trade, fundamentally altered the forms of their governments.
Their grievances – indictments that led them to deem that man unfit to be the ruler of a free people – ring familiar today. Current conditions lead many to suspect the end of the American experiment is near. That suspicion is based either on a misreading of the nation’s history or an inability to remember it at all.
If history is any kind of guide, this moment – with its eerily similar injuries and usurpations and disgruntled youths drained of national loyalty by rulers deaf to the voice of justice – does not signal an end fast approaching but rather a new beginning about to commence.
Mike McCabe is a Wisconsin native and has been a farmhand, journalist, educator and civic leader. He is the author of the novel, “Miracles Along County Q,” and keeps an online journal at mikemccabe.substack.com where he shares weekly essays.
