Okay, I’ll come out and say it: The young are moonbat crazy. Not all, but stunningly large numbers are. “Moonbat”, what’s that? Crazy is the easy part. The word “moonbat” in this context has been attributed to conservative commentator Howie Carr in referring to California governor Jerry Brown, Jr., who was caricatured in an online poster, “Before Moonbats, there was Jerry ‘Moonbeam’ Brown”.
It appears to be getting worse – the moonbat craziness, that is.
I know about youthful kookiness because “Been there, done that”, as any child of the 60’s should know. “Drugs, sex, and rock ‘n roll” isn’t exactly a clarion call for mature judgment. The nutty stuff is rooted in the young’s unappreciation for the arduous path that was trod by others to get to the present. It stems from the young’s newness to the world. All they really know is what’s around them.
They can be taught history, but they have no experience with prior struggles, and telling and showing them won’t be enough, even if someone lectured them. My WWII-generation parents experienced life before air conditioning, and when capable of acquiring it, they did in a heartbeat. Today, large percentages of the young, pampered by modern conveniences, prefer to end a/c in a holy war to defeat climate change. Yet, they wouldn’t last long without it, along with their trendy ev’s and obsession with connectivity. There’s only so much room on the coastal plain to accommodate the added millions fleeing the oppressive heat everywhere else. And the attendant blackouts and spiking utility bills won’t be good for streaming and the apps on their cellphones that direct them to the nearest Starbucks and car charger that won’t charge, the cell towers and relay centers absent the juice to run.
The moonbat in our young came out in all its glory in the last few elections. No, this conclusion isn’t ageist prejudice. Once again, “Been there, done that.” Epidemics of STD’s and drug abuse, riots, and mass displays of self-righteous posturing were as characteristic of my youth as flower power. The peace movement’s catastrophic demand to withdraw from South Vietnam led to the fall of Southeast Asia and millions exterminated and millions more shoved into tortuous reeducation camps. Not quite a Dark Age – for us, that is, a Dark Age for SE Asia – but certainly the quality-of-life lights were dimmed.
Well, the young are at it again. Kristen Soltis Anderson, pollster and partner of Echelon Insights, unknowingly lays out the evidence for moonbat craziness in the under-40’s. Large portions of youthful voters are committed to social and economic suicide. On the social side, they aren’t marrying and having kids at levels of previous generations, support sexual unions that can’t produce them, and want to treat pregnancy as a disease. I guess to make it all go down easier, they favor legal and social approval of THC intoxication in today’s highly potent, selectively cultivated pot (5 to 6 times more lusty than the kind passed around in the smoking circles of my youth).
The economic side of the self-abasement is a toxic embrace of socialism and eco-madness. Unknowingly for them, the socialist paradise of North Korea didn’t invent the microchip. No socialist Shangri-la had a hand in that. It’s a product of free-enterprise entrepreneurialism, capitalism. You know, private property and profits, all that “evil” stuff. Socialism is an assault on private property, profits, and the rich who got rich because they brought all that stuff to the Antifa zealots so they could virally coordinate to close down Portland.
The eco-madness is their poorly thought out but loudly espoused mitigations of “climate change”. Well, prove it. Prove that “climate change” is a man-caused apocalypse. Prove that your chic measures – ev’s, a grid reliant on windmills and solar panels, and chicken-coop housing in today’s urban hellscapes – will make more than a dimple of improvement on the hypothetical crisis. Convince me that it won’t lead to central planning, the ideological cousin of totalitarianism. Convince me that it won’t lead to the iron fist of totalitarianism to socially engineer the Sierra Club’s ideal person. History shows a link between moonbat utopianism in power and thuggery. What makes the young so confident in thinking that the historically evident travel from an imposed fantasy to full-throated coercion can be successfully suspended? History isn’t encouraging.
Here’s Soltis’s scoop on the political status of the young: they are strong Democrats, stronger than earlier renditions of youthfulness. The upper end of millennials has reached 40 and they punched the Democrat ticket by nine points in 2022. The bulk of them, though, are in their 30’s, and combined with the twenty-somethings, they favored the Democrats by 28 points! The Republicans are in a world of hurt with them. It’s been particularly true in the last three election cycles.
What animates these young folks to ignore the urban filth and crime, inflation, a looming recession, the wildlands as open-air combustion chambers, the blackouts, the crippling national debt, the invasion of boys into girls’ sports and bathrooms, and schools that function more as lefty finishing schools than places of learning? The affection for the donkey party can’t solely be laid at the feet of Trump. The young obviously care more about other things. Among those under 30, 53% want abortion to be legal “under any circumstance”. That could unthinkingly include late term/partial birth abortions, ending the life of babies who survive the procedure, sex-selection abortions, and excusing those mothers who see a baby as an obstacle in the climb up the greasy corporate pole.
“Under any circumstance” is an awfully grizzly affair. Many of the young seem to be fully onboard with the “right” to abortion translating into the “right” of the mother and doctor to be executioners. Or do they? “Under any circumstance” precludes any consideration of viability. Pardon me, but I can’t accept the claim that 53% of the young are so inhuman. For many in the polling, I speculate, the response was a visceral reaction to Dobbs, which was caricatured by a similarly ill-informed press as a ban on abortion. But explaining the decision as a return to federalism would require an understanding of federalism. The trillions of dollars spent on the schools has yet to succeed at reading, writing, and math (NAEP scores). What makes you think that they will be any better at conveying the meaning of federalism?
Trillions more and dismal results (NAEP scores). Dismal results and political illiteracy. Political illiteracy and hitching a ride on the Democrats’ train of affection for government as super daddy.
Economic illiteracy too. Young people support labor unions because they supposedly have a “positive impact on the country”, more so than the church and the military. As long as we keep the discussion out of reality, America’s adversarial unions are seen in poorly developed young minds as fighting the battle against the exploitation of innocent workers by robber barons. But it isn’t that simple. A strong historical case can be made that industrial labor unions killed Detroit and sent American steel into a tailspin. Unionization was contorted into corporate and job euthanasia. Their extravagant demands, wrapped in a promiscuous right to strike and lavish collective bargaining agreements, paved the way for the rise of Toyota and the other Asian and European automakers. The industrial heartland became deindustrialized to a great extent by their workers.
The Rust Belt became as rusty as its unions. Who wants to invest in a dive into the jaws of our labor unions, so long as we still have the freedom to decide where to put our money? Better to avoid the Upper Midwest Rust Belt and go to friendlier places, like the American South, who are without laws that grant power to unions to force everyone into their clutches. “Right to work” laws in the South weren’t a ban on labor unions, but merely made them voluntary. Such nuances aren’t the stuff of K-to-grad school curriculums. We’ve trained a generation in AFL-CIO urban myths.
It doesn’t end there. More immediately, our young folks seem to be okay with not getting the latest edition of the I-phone, or even underwear. Those container ships anchored over the horizon at San Pedro were a gift of the Pacific Maritime Association (an affiliate of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union) representing dock workers. As of October 2022, 77 ships remain anchored outside the port. Our supply chain is dependent on the featherbedding of $171,000/year dock workers (2019 numbers). Monopolies of labor have the funny tendency of behaving like any other monopoly.
Even “the most pro-union president” (Biden) is feeling the heat of another possible disruption from a rail strike. Once the containers get off the ship, the most congested docks face the most congested railyard in the country. Its expansion faces the usual suspects: organized eco-zealots and California’s exhaustive eco-regulations. The state’s EIR’s (environmental impact reports), to go along with the fed’s EIS’s (environmental impact statements), to go along with multiple layers of bureaucratic meddling, prompted endless delays and lawsuits. We may get the expansion, but not without a taxpayer breaking and company busting and bloated price tag, not an unusual experience in the Democrats’ Mecca and Medina of California. Remember the state’s high-speed rail monolith to nowhere?
Such episodes don’t register with the young. I think that too many of the young are into the excitement and drama normally found in their personal diversions and aren’t attracted to the boring and tedious work of reading and contemplation. They won’t read a magazine of substance but will glance at Twitter burps and anything on their Instagram feed.
Why bother to vote If that is the case? Has anyone ever pondered the possibility that voting could be an immoral act? Think about it. An uninformed vote is the equal of an informed one, a frivolous one equal to a serious one. As in a fraudulent vote, one cancels the other. If you don’t know, don’t care, and won’t inform yourself, don’t you have a moral responsibility to stay away from the ballot . . . and power tools? Such an ethic of responsibility cannot be encapsulated in a law, but it should be implanted in our minds – to go along with honesty, charity, and love – from a young age. Before you do something, do it responsibly.
Today’s young are less inclined to be responsible because some parents and most of our schools have failed to prepare them to face the issues of their time. Take marriage as an example, same-zex marriage in particular. The young favor it by upwards to three-quarters in recent polling.
But is same-sex marriage an oxymoron? Has the thought ever graced their mind? Same-sex marriage might be sensible if marriage is construed as nothing but assuaging the interests of adults. In history, however, marriage has always been tied to civilization’s stake in procreation. For that to happen, heterosexual behavior is required. Not every married couple of a heterosexual complexion can or chooses to have children. That’s not the point. The long nurturing process of our young requires the tight bond of the people who brought them into being. The state and its disconnected operatives are no stand-in.
That tight bond is marriage, and it should be reserved for heterosexual pairings. Whether they have children or not is a personal matter. Other conceptions (civil unions, etc.) with many of the privileges and protections of marriage can be made available for same-sex couples. But heterosexuality is a privileged coupling because without it, there is no next generation. A society of the incontinent and gray-haired, because we have elevated everything else but childbearing and childrearing, doesn’t bode well for survival. Heterosexuality must be privileged. Marriage is the way, born of necessity, to do it.
The reservation of marriage for complimentary sexual pairings isn’t a prudish ban on “loving who you want”. That’s pure sophistry. Marriage is society’s minimal requirement for there to be a next generation.
Has this argument ever been presented to the three-quarters who think that same-sex marriage is a great idea? The overwhelming numbers in support of something is not proof of the thing’s validity. More accurately, it’s evidence of a lack of exposure to the history of our institutions, and to a real debate. Like much else involving the young, they don’t know any better and nobody told them.
It comes back to maturity. One element of maturity is tied up in the economic concept of tradeoffs: you can’t have it all. No one can. We give up one thing to obtain another. So, for our fulminating statue-topplers and Antifa zealots, and our twenty-somethings whose education didn’t educate, you can’t simultaneously have your socialism and 5G and the next generation of connectivity. That stuff is born of freedom, the freedom to live a life, to think anew, to acquire, without undermining the prerequisites for their being generations to come. It’s not the freedom of bureaucrats to meddle.
The young are just moonbat crazy. Is this what degringolade (downfall) looks like?
RogerG
Read here for more:
* “Republicans’ Lost Youth”, Kristen Soltis Anderson, National Review, Dec. 1, 2022, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2022/12/19/republicans-lost-youth/
* “NAEP national test scores fall to lowest levels in decades!”, Anthony Picciano of CUNY, Sept, 2, 2022, at https://apicciano.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2022/09/02/naep-national-test-scores-fall-to-lowest-levels-in-decades/#:~:text=Driving%20the%20news%3A%20The%20results%20on%20the%20NAEP%2C,in%20learning%20outcomes%20were%20starkest%20among%20lower-performing%20students.
* “77 box vessels waiting outside San Pedro Bay ports”, World Cargo News, Oct. 25, 2022, at https://www.worldcargonews.com/news/news/77-box-vessels-waiting-outside-san-pedro-bay-ports-67501#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20Marine%20Exchange%20of%20Southern%20California%2C,Los%20Angeles%20are%20due%20to%20arrive%20at%20anchor.