Consequently, only a third of Millenials and Gen Zers will acknowledge that they're "extremely proud" of their country. She invites these Americans to ask themselves why.
Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our families. Most of us wouldn’t trash-talk our neighborhoods. Think about that the next time someone trash-talks your national home and neighborhood, your country.This is particularly ironic given that the United States is by almost any measure not only the greatest country in the history of civilization, but it's the greatest country in history in which to be a minority. There's never been any other place in the world where minorities have more opportunity to flourish than they do here.
One such figure, impresario of the New York Times’s “1619 Project,” says she has never regarded herself as “particularly patriotic.”
Another, whose sulfurous racialism permeates elite education, says that he has never felt free in the U.S., even as his every grievance is celebrated and subsidized. If they have such a low opinion of America, what makes you think they care about Americans—including you?
It's why tens of thousands of Central Americans, Haitians and others from around the globe risk their lives in an arduous trek to get here.
Eberstadt continues, arguing that today's younger Americans have also been robbed of two great sourcees of immaterial wealth, "the consolations and joys of family life" and the rich benefits that accompany religious belief:
Generations of thinkers have disparaged the family as the enemy of utopian schemes. In their depictions, home and hearth amount to a slaughterhouse of dreams and aspirations, especially for women. To the contrary: Unprecedented rates of abortion, fatherlessness and divorce, far from liberating you, have subtracted actual and potential loved ones from your lives. No wonder surveys show that young people are the loneliest Americans...."This brings us," she declares, "to the political choice before you. Today’s neo-Marxism and identity politics seek to co-opt your youthful energies into a lifetime of performative rancor. Is that what you want?"
...[Moreover, religious belief has inspired] the greatest art and science, architecture and music and human creation at large that our species has ever devised. Permanent membership in “none of the above” secularism risks relinquishing your own cultural inheritance: Western civilization.
Good question. To be permanently angry, to be permanently focused on racial, sexual or LGBTQ identity is to dissipate one's human potential by expending it on relative trifles. It's to spend one's life judging books by their dust jackets.
Eberstadt concludes with this:
Young people are designed by nature to love and to be loved with energy and magnanimity.When young people have it constantly drilled into them that their fellow Americans are the odious individuals they're often portrayed as, it makes despising them seem appropriate. So far from treating them with dignity, respect and kindness it becomes much easier to treat them with self-righteous contempt and hatred. Sadly, though, people who choose to live this way will find that Eberstadt is right.
Today’s misanthropes tell you the opposite: that humanity is a toxin on the planet, unworthy of reproduction. This counsel couldn’t be more wrong—especially for you. If loneliness is the problem, putting more people in your lives with marriage and children is the self-evident solution.
The left tells you that your fellow citizens are racists, fascists, sexists, bigots and haters. This relentless negativity obliterates youthful hopes. It shrivels the youthful imagination. Worst of all, it shrinks your hearts.
A life spent judging others on the basis of what one perceives to be their politically incorrect sins, a life lived in a semi-permanent state of anger, bitterness, hostility and contempt, is a life in which happiness will prove very elusive.
