Gen Z and Our Expanding Moral Vacuum

What's going on with our young people?

For a month now we've watched as thousands of students and others in their age cohort have demonstrated all across the country in thinly veiled support of a terrorist organization that had just slaughtered 1200 people.

Following hard after is news that a host of social media "influencers" are actually commending and excusing Osama bin Laden, the man chiefly responsible for the deaths of 3000 Americans on 9/11.

National Review's Jim Geraghty elaborates:

TikTok users are approvingly quoting a 2002 letter from al-Qaeda terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, and insisting that bin Laden makes a lot of legitimate points, is the sort of thing that makes you wish gullible young people would go back to eating Tide Pods.

You might have thought that the minds of America’s young people would not be so malleable that they could perceive one of the most notorious mass murderers of Americans in history as a justifiable critic of American policies, but here we are. For those of us of a certain age, this development is a difficult reminder that the unforgettable events of our younger years, the ones that shaped us and the world we live in, are just dry pages in a history book to the younger generation.

Is Generation Z so morally unmoored that they can't distinguish between good and evil? They talk of injustice but what is their concept of justice? What is justice grounded upon? Is justice simply a matter of their own personal feelings? Geraghty excerpts from an article in Newsweek:

A decades-old document allegedly written by Osama bin Laden and titled “Letter to America” recently went viral on TikTok, with some young Americans believing that the al-Qaeda founder made valid points about their own country.

The two-page document, which was published by The Guardian, is a letter Bin Laden wrote in 2002 as a polemic against the U.S. and an explanation of the ideology that led him to orchestrate the 9/11 attacks. . . .

“It’s wild and everyone should read it,” said one TikTok user, warning that the letter had left her “very disillusioned” and “confused.” Another user talked of having an “existential crisis” after reading the document and having her entire viewpoint on life changed by it. . . .

“The American people are the ones who pay the taxes which fund the planes that bomb us in Afghanistan, the tanks that strike and destroy our homes in Palestine, the armies which occupy our lands in the Arabian Gulf, and the fleets which ensure the blockade of Iraq,” bin Laden wrote. “This is why the American people cannot be innocent of all the crimes committed by the Americans and Jews against us.”

Slate has this:

In what may be the most stunning case of antisemitic distortion and disinformation in the last six weeks—a very high bar, given the slew of such cases since the terrorist assault on Israel—hundreds of TikTok videos have cropped up praising excerpts of a letter written by Osama bin Laden in 2002 that allegedly explains (and, to many social media readers, justifies) al-Qaida’s attack on Sept. 11, 2001, and by extension, Hamas’ attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

“If you haven’t, you have to go read Osama’s letter to America,” one user who posted it wrote. “Then you’ll see what this has to do with us. They have lied to us more than enough. Reading that was honestly life changing. My bond with this conflict”—presumably Hamas’ conflict against Israel—“is unshakable.”

Another user said, “So I just read ‘A Letter to America’ and I will never look at life the same. I will never look at this country the same.” The video lured 1.2 million views in less than 24 hours.

Does it occur to young people reading this that there might be very good reasons why our military has had to fight in these far off cesspools? Do they think that other young men and women actually want to have themselves burned and disfigured and killed fighting against people who glory in death and violence?

Have young people become so indoctrinated with critical theory that they now sympathize with mass murderers like Hamas and bin Laden? Have they swallowed the absurd claim of the critical theorists that anyone who is of darker complexion is oppressed and anyone who is paler is an oppressor and that whatever the oppressed do to the oppressor is ipso facto justified?

It seems that many of those marching in the streets and chanting for the annihilation of Israel are victims of a horrible moral inversion where evil is embraced as good and good is regarded as evil.

Why has this come about? Perhaps part of the reason is that too many young people know too little history. They don't know the history of the 1300 year war between Islam and the West nor do they know what has transpired over the last century in Palestine.

Add to that the fact that many of our young are growing up in a moral vacuum created by a secular, materialistic worldview that cuts out from under them any objective basis for moral judgment, a worldview in which right and wrong are simply whatever makes them feel good or bad, and you wind up with young adults on Tik Tok saying the sorts of things that we read in the above excerpts.