June 27, 2009 7:24 AM

 

Sophomores

I'm convinced there are many truly wise youngsters. On some fronts, my son Nicholas is more measured than I am, and certainly more patient with his peers. David as a young shepherd, facing the Philistine brigades, was wiser than any of Saul's army, and Patrick Henry as a young legislator in Virginia knew the nature of the truth better than his older, more cautious colleagues.

Unfortunately...if you follow your kids' conversations on social networking sites, you get that sort of "Lord of the Flies" feeling that the plane has gone down, there is no pilot in site, and the savages are beginning to sharpen their spears. That's a little dramatic, but the power of the bleating herd is pretty immense. Kids who know better try to be polite, and hormonal bullies rage on, with or without any real insight.

"Youth Culture," when you think about it, is really a kind of insipid, tragic, graceless thing. It's also, historically, a new thing. During the Revolutionary War, you didn't have "the children's ministry," or the "young officers ball." Everyone socialized with each other, young and old. Through much of American history, classrooms have traditionally been inter-generational, with older scholars helping the younger ones. Worship itself was always congregational, never segregated into neat little chronological bands--aping grade school, junior high, and high school. When Jane Austen's Bennett girls went off to Netherfield for the ball, they were chaperoned by their older aunts and uncles.

This week's dead weirdo celebrity is a perfect example of the other extreme. When you allow children to define their own culture, you get, well, culture that is childish, loud, flamboyant, hormonal, shallow and eccentric, (eccentric in an evil way). You get plastic surgery and an unwholesome fixation on youth. You get drug addiction, amorphous sexuality, and ultimately tragedy--as immortality escapes us on this side of the veil and aging celebrities never want to be "Mrs. Aniston" or "Mrs. Pitt," just "Jennifer." With youth culture, there is no one minding the store. The kids steal whatever candy they want.

That's not to say there hasn't been some great music written in the last fifty years, and some great films produced, but the simple act of asking, "what message is this song or movie sending?" gets you in trouble.

"Chill, man, we just want to dance. It's just a movie, man. It's just entertainment."

Parents--wake up. It's your job to ask the questions, to make distinctions between good art and bad art, and to encourage your kids to be CRITICAL thinkers, not dry sponges that soak up whatever poison is spilled on to the street,

..or into their Facebook accounts.

 

More of the Farm Journal -- June 25, 2009