Raising the Next Greatest Generation

I recently saw an old video of actor Peter Dinklage (Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones) giving a speech to the 2012 graduating class at Bennington College.  It was a wonderful speech, combining an excellent mix of realism and inspiration.  You can find it on YouTube if you are interested in seeing it.  But one thing that struck me was when he said one of the greatest gifts his parents gave him was forcing him to make his own way once he graduated from college.


That statement is so profound and yet it flies in the face of how society treats young people today.  More and more we are coddling young adults and keeping them in perpetual adolescence (and in some cases childhood).  Such an approach does them no favors in the long run and carries grave implications for society in general – as we are starting to see.


The fact is, the values we are imprinting on young people and the attitudes we are indulging are the blueprint for the demise of a civilization.  They run counter to everything that make individuals and societies stable and prosperous.


The prosperous society in which we live was settled by courageous individuals who braved a long ocean voyage to find freedom in a new land.  It was founded by people who risked everything to stand against the greatest world power of their time.  Its boundaries were established by pioneers who loaded their families and few worldly possessions into wagons to stake their claim in the wilderness.  It was built by immigrants who left the world they knew to come to a new country seeking nothing but an opportunity to prosper.  And all of this has been and continues to be defended by men and women who storm beaches, race across battlefields, sail to the ends of the earth and fight in the skies.


The Greatest Generation that fought and won World War II did not just magically appear.  They were raised by parents who gave them the tools to fulfill their collective destiny.  And this blueprint for greatness has not been lost beyond our reach.  Too many of us have simply refused to follow it.


Courage, hard work, perseverance, and self-reliance – these are the traits that have built this prosperous society and all successful societies before it.  They are the traits possessed by all those who have built every major corporation, created every life-changing invention, and achieved every crowning moment of human endeavor.


Today we have politicians falling all over themselves to offer free things to young adults (although nothing is truly free, it is just a matter of who pays for it).  We have parents who are indulging their children to the point that they are stunting their maturity and destroying their prospects of achieving the greatness locked inside them.  It’s not that this generation of young adults is somehow intrinsically different from those that came before it.  What is different is how they were raised.


Instead of fostering courage, we have cultivated fear in young people – fear that Climate Change will destroy the planet, fear that a political party will oppress you, fear that the police will kill you if you have the wrong skin color, fear that the patriarchy will keep you down.


In place of hard work we have put entitlement.  You have a right to free health care.  You have a right to free education.  You have a right to free child care.  You have the right to a job.  You have the right to a guaranteed income if you can’t find a job to your liking.


Perseverance has given way to immediate gratification.  Everyone wants to run the company or reach some other pinnacle of success in their chosen field immediately, or at the very least before they are thirty.  If they can’t reach that goal then it is not their fault, but rather racism, sexism or homophobia.  When failure inevitably comes, they can’t deal with it because they’ve been raised in a bubble of self-affirmation filled with participation trophies.


Self-reliance has been replaced with demands for dependency.  Every previous generation has managed to find their way in the world and raise a family, often leaving the next generation better off than them.  But somehow this generation of young adults feel that they are incapable of carrying out their role in this cycle without a massive social safety net.  So now they cry out for Socialism, not fully understanding what it is, drawn in by the siren call of free stuff but blind to the rocks of disincentivization and oppression that have destroyed every previous society that has tried it.


The fact is, these traits of success work in conjunction with one another.  It takes courage to be self-reliant.  It takes courage to believe that your hard work will pay off.  It takes courage to persevere and pick yourself back up each time you fail.


It is hard work to stay brave.  It is hard work to persevere and keep trying over and over again.  It is hard work to rely on yourself instead of seeking handouts from others.


It takes perseverance to keep working hard.  It takes perseverance to stay brave.  It takes perseverance to remain self-reliant.


Self-reliance is the heart of courage.  Bravery is not something that someone can give to you.  It comes from within, either through belief in yourself or a belief in God.  Self-reliance fuels hard work and perseverance because when your fate is determined by your own efforts and not contributions from others, you will be more likely to work harder and keep trying to improve your station in life.
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This nation cannot survive a system of upbringing that continues to reinforce dependency, immediate gratification, entitlement and fear.  If we continue to imprint future generations with those values, our society will fail.  If you truly love your children, you must let them find their own way, even if their road starts off in a difficult place.  But you must also be sure to teach them the values of courage, hard work, perseverance, and self-reliance.  A successful society is one comprised of successful individuals.  We must give each generation the tools to succeed and then give them the freedom to use them.