Daniel McCarthy says current generation has been raised ‘to prefer comfort to glory’
By The Independence Day season is a time to ask a hard question.
Could the Americans of today have won the Revolutionary War – and would they even have wanted to fight it?
Our leaders have plenty to say about freedom, though none say it as well as Thomas Jefferson did in the Declaration of Independence.
Yet no words, not even Jefferson’s, could persuade the British to set us free.
That was the task of arms.
Having a country means being ready to fight for it.
But Americans had taken up their muskets for many reasons – some of them economic, some of them local, some of them religious or ideological.
What the Continental Congress did, in authorizing the words that Jefferson wrote to speak for the nation, was to subsume all particular grievances and arguments into a single moral case, expressed in the strongest legal and philosophical language of the day.
The head follows the heart – but when the head doubts, the heart wavers, too.
The Declaration of Independence dispelled any doubt in the patriot’s soul.
Americans knew how to shoot, they could organize themselves on the battlefield and in camp, and they were prepared for the privations of war.
Body and spirit, they were ready to fight until they won.
Few Americans of military age are ready today.
A Wall Street Journal report notes that according to the Department of Defense, “77% of American youth are disqualified from military service due to a lack of physical fitness, low test scores, criminal records including drug use or other problems.”
In any generation, there are young men and women whose individual character flaws are their own fault.
But when an entire generation is as poorly prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship as today’s young people are – including the ultimate responsibility of defending the nation – the blame falls heaviest on their elders.
Our institutions shaped this youth cohort, and the leaders at the top of our institutions utterly failed them.
The message from our schools and universities, media and political organizations, and even a startling number of hospitals and churches is that life is mostly about feeling good in the quickest and easiest way possible.
If there are personal consequences from living like this – obesity, for example, or drug addiction and a criminal record – the task of society is to alleviate such self-inflicted harm, through body-positive propaganda, “safe” injection sites and criminal-justice reform.
If Americans are lonely or sad, there’s a pill or a porn site for them. Nobody will judge.
Hedonism is a peril every successful society runs.
What’s unusual about American society in the 21st century isn’t our short-term living so much as the fury aimed at anyone or anything that rebukes it.
That includes fury at our own past – even at statues of men who put country and honor above personal gratification.