Here’s the latest from the crossroads of faith, media & culture: 06/23/23

Image from The New York Post

What comes after Generation Z? Even the moniker given to today’s teens and young adults suggests a generation with no future – as if they’re, basically, the end of the line. Is it any wonder that, as a group, they’re struggling with mental issues? Hopelessness will do that to a person – and a generation. The question then is why are today’s young people feeling so hopeless?

Much has been made about the negative impact the pandemic and, notably, the school shutdowns have had on not just student test scores but on their socializing skills. It’s as if their youthful milestones (team sports, proms and and the like) have been snatched from them. The mask wearing did more than normalize hypochondria (which had previously been considered a phobia to be overcome). That’s because the masks weren’t primarily (if much at all) to protect them from a virus but to protect their teachers and other elders from them. It was almost like they were the disease. And, while the risk-benefit equation of taking a vaccine that was rushed to market (under Operation Warp Speed) probably favored the taking of the jab for older adults and people with other health issues, the idea of mandating it for children seems much more questionable and likely more motivated by what is safer for adults than what is safest for them. But, after all, it’s not the only time this generation of adults has appeared to place our own concerns over that of our children. The public school system (including teachers unions) often seems more interested in protecting their own turf and power than they are in getting kids out of failing schools through school choice.

Then there’s the cynical industry that has grown up around Critical Race Theory with the all-too-apparent goal of ensuring that Americans remain divided by such immutable traits as skin color while undermining the progress made over decades toward a more just and colorblind society. It’s bad enough that the CRT industry persists in creating unproductive political conflict among we adults who should be working together for a better future for the emerging generation and those to follow  but they infect our children with a sense of shame or perpetual victimhood, neither of which is conducive to mental health. They’re also deprived of a unifying sense of patriotic identity that doesn’t deny the sins of the past but does put the emphasis on the progress made. We are, in fact, not slaves to the past.

Beyond that, we have stopped arming kids with the adage “Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me.” Sure, words sting – and we should teach our kids to be kind in the words they use – but we are doing them no favors by teaching them to crumble at every real, or sometimes, imagined insult.

Worse even than CRT is the imposing of gender ideology on young easily impressionable minds that are prone to confusion over just about everything, including their own sexual identities. It is not kindness, for example, to tell a young boy who is struggling to fit in with the other boys that he may, in fact, not be a boy at all. A boy doesn’t have to like so-called boy things to be a boy. The same goes for girls. Let’s try a little tolerance for differences within the genders before we go down the psychologically abusive path of denying them. As adults, we have a basic moral responsibility to protect kids from destructive self doubts, not feeding into them. And, let’s certainly not be so arrogant as to encourage life-altering administering of hormone-blocking drugs or permanent gender-denying surgery. If such a decision is ever to be made, it should be made by the person him or herself as a clear-thinking adult. Sure, there’s lots of money to be made and pockets to be lined, but that’s all the more reason kids need adults to advocate for their protection.

Meanwhile, even debate over the issue is largely shutdown as just this week AMC was pressured into aborting plans to show the movie No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care in its theaters. As Tomboy author Lisa Selin Davis says in the trailer below “I want liberals to make room for gender diversity and that includes masculine girls and feminine boys without telling them that they need to leave their sex category because they are different.”

If you want to be on the right side of history – not a century from now but a decade from now – then stand against the sexual maiming of children for profit.

Add on top of all this, not just the much-discussed and well-documented negative impact of social media on teen mental health, but the overall pessimism of a mass media that puts forth sky-is-falling climate change theories as fact and you have the ingredients of a mental illness cocktail that is hurting all of us – but none more so than our youths who, rather than being encouraged to leave their footprint on the world, are discouraged from doing so because it’s supposedly destructive to the planet. Apparently, it’s better that there be no evidence of their existence. Or, maybe, it would be better that they didn’t exist at all. They certainly better not have children of their own. At least that’s what many kids might surmise.

In January of 2019, the great prognosticator known as AOC urgently predicted we had 12 years to stop climate change from killing us all. A student using racist math (because what isn’t?) might conclude that we have just about seven years to go before Doomsday. They need to know that apocalyptic forecasts are nothing new and that doomsday scenarios have a way of coming and going while the world keeps chugging along. They may freak us out for a while but they eventually get memory-holed paving the way for the next catastrophic forecast that also doesn’t happen. Prudent environmentalism is, of course, good but fearmongering for dollars isn’t. It would helpful to teach our kids to discern the difference. It would also help if we taught our kids to stop worrying and believe this:

It’s time to offer our kids hope. It’s time to end cultural child abuse.

John W. Kennedy is a writer, producer and media development consultant specializing in television and movie projects that uphold positive timeless values, including trust in God.