Cultural pundits have spoken negatively for decades about modern society’s obsession with youth. There is a good reason for that “obsession”. While you may (or may not) see the wisdom of experience in my eyes, the 24-year-old man has the vitality and maybe even more vision.
The world has always and properly depended on the young to lead the way into a better future.
Bill Gates was 20 years old and his partner, Paul Allen, was 22 when they founded Microsoft Corp. Gregorio del Pilar was leading Filipino soldiers when he was 24 and died at the Battle of Tirad Pass. Dr. Jose Rizal wrote Noli Me Tángere at 26 and El Filibusterismo at 30 years of age.
Frenchman Blaise Pascal invented the mechanical calculator at 19 years old and countryman Louis Braille was 15 years old when he invented Braille Reading. British playwright George Bernard Shaw may have thought the “Youth is wasted on the young”. However, it is the young who have challenged the existing order and status quo thinking to move humanity to a better place.
While the methods and strategies have not always been correct, and sometimes the arguments were simply wrong, from global issues, such as the environment and poverty to education and technology, the youth has continually built the future. Perhaps, now something has changed, and not for the better.
In a global survey conducted last November asking, “Is your country moving in the right direction?”, only Canada of all the Western countries had a majority answering “Yes” and that was by a narrow margin. In the US, 65 percent said “No”. Sweden, the “happiest nation on earth” according to one set of parameters, also said “No” by a 78 percent-to-22 percent “No” vote. An amazing 87 percent of South Koreans felt their country was moving in the wrong direction.
American Ted Malloch is President Donald J. Trump’s nominee as ambassador to the European Union. He served on the executive board of the World Economic Forum, which hosts the annual Davos meetings in Switzerland. However, he recently said in a television interview, with regard to the push for continued globalization of politics, economics and societies: “The Davos Man is dead.”
The last decade has seen an economic disaster fall on the heads of the young, worldwide. The “liberal-oriented” Economic Policy Institute posts these statistics for the United States. “Among blacks, 51 percent of high-school graduates and 23 percent of college graduates are currently unemployed. Among Hispanic high-school and college graduates, unemployment was at 36 percent and 22 percent, respectively, with whites coming in at 33 percent and 13 percent.”
Yet, polls conducted globally by Pew Research show by an overwhelming majority those same young people support virtually all of the initiatives from the “Davos men and women”.
According to the Strauss-Howe generational theory as described in the 1997 book The Fourth Turning by authors William Strauss and Neil Howe, which should be required reading, the “Crisis” period that we may be into sees the emergence of the “Grey Champion/s” to lead rather than the younger “Nomads” and “Artists”. But note this also, “Each time the Grey Champion appeared marked the arrival of a moment of darkness, and adversity, and peril, the climax of the Fourth Turning.”
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