What Have We Done?
Imagine yourself as a new college graduate.
I spent a long weekend in a college town with brand new graduates, including my son. It was deeply gratifying to see my child accomplish something I never did myself. But it was also a glimpse into the reality on the ground in America.
First, the good news: the kids are alright. While it’s just one school and one group of people, everyone I met was an energetic, empathetic, and intelligent young adult—no zombified chatbot addicts or radicalized anarchists among them. They were, you know, perfectly normal.
For me, this was a bit of a relief. The environment since Trump was elected again has been so acutely toxic, I wondered how far the crazy had penetrated. Anecdotally speaking, not far. These young people were mostly indifferent to politics—they all seemed to understand that it had gone off the rails and just didn’t want anything to do with it.
That seems fair enough.
Their formative years were spent in the Decade of Trump with a short break in the middle. They’ve all watched the country get more and more radicalized. They’ve seen blatant racism and naked corruption in government. They watched an insurrection of the U.S. Capitol. And they watched the Biden administration fail to do anything about it.
They’ve seen the Supreme Court destroy a half-century of women’s rights, make the president a king, and institutionalize racial profiling. They’ve watched the U.S. Congress degenerate into a QAnon chat room fused with the Duma. And they’ve watched the Epstein cover up.
Now these bright young minds are being released into a nation where politics has been captured by a cult of billionaires waging resource wars overseas, raising prices at home, taking away student loan relief, and pushing for AI to take their jobs.
Unfortunately for these graduates, things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. There is a perfect storm lining up, just as they try to find ballast.
The President they’re meant to follow is a racist, demented narcissist who just gave himself a $1.776 billion slush fund to reward people who stormed the Capitol, beat cops, or got in legal trouble for him. He essentially pardoned himself and his family of tax fraud. He’s currently blockading oil and fertilizer to half the world after losing a war to Iran. And he’s giving billionaire elites free rein to inflate the AI bubble to historic dimensions—leaving the rest of us behind.
Why would a young adult entering a system which allows all this to happen feel they will be given a fair shake? Why should they care?
When business leaders who represent the apex of American capitalism are people like pathological racist Elon Musk, a sadistic conman about to be the world’s first trillionaire, what are young people supposed to think about the system?
The U.S. is currently under a full-scale assault from within. The federal government has been captured and transformed into a personal grift for Donald Trump—and one more tool in a long techno-fascist world domination plan by the PayPal Mafia. The adults who were supposed to protect our kids, simply didn’t. Both parties failed them, as did their parents and grandparents.
I ask this looking right in the mirror: What have we done?
For decades, we allowed the worst of us to breed at the top of the pyramid. We allowed dark psychologies to oversee the slow erosion of our institutions, the degradation of our morals, and the capture of our technology. We sorted the psychopaths to the top because they talked a good game, made us money, or rationalized our grievances. We got lazy and comfortable. We did not do the work to ensure the system would still be there for our kids.
What we have done is fail. We have failed to do our jobs to keep the system working for our children and grandchildren. We failed to recognize that the evils of our past were never something we could leave behind, that we had to be constantly diligent against them. We failed to learn from history, so now we are repeating it.
But what I experienced from being with thousands of college kids—yes, I’m old enough to call them that—contained none of the darkness the regime is selling. The psychopathologies that captured the United States government and the technology industry are not shared by our youth.
The death of empathy, respect, and love has been greatly exaggerated. There is a wave of young people who take care of the stray cats near their apartments, who make friends with their neighbors, and accept people for who they are, not what they look like or where they came from.
But the people who screwed it up for them—the grown-ups who dropped the ball on keeping the system working—need to understand these young adults don’t care about our purity tests, our establishment politics, or our liberal sensitivities. They just want a job, a nice place to live, and maybe a family. They want a government that lets them be who they are and shuts the hell up.
They have no loyalty to the system that existed because they watched it die. They were the generation to see the death of the neoliberal experiment.
So again, the good news is that the kids are alright. We didn’t screw that part up too much. But the bad news is we’ve left them with a disaster, one they may spend a generation trying to recover from.
The least we can do is give them the chance to rebuild something different. Those of us who let this happen on our watch must break the corrupt crime ring that captured our children’s future so they can chart it for themselves.
What have we done? Not nearly enough.
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