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A Slavish Generation

The way many high school students see it, government censorship of newspapers may not be a bad thing, and flag burning is hardly protected free speech. It turns out the First Amendment is a second-rate issue to many of those nearing their own adult independence, according to a study of high school attitudes released Monday. […]

The way many high school students see it, government censorship of newspapers may not be a bad thing, and flag burning is hardly protected free speech.

It turns out the First Amendment is a second-rate issue to many of those nearing their own adult independence, according to a study of high school attitudes released Monday.

The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly.

Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories. ~CNN

Sadly, this doesn’t much surprise me. Naturally, students are not being taught these constitutional fundamentals, and the predominant mood in the country over the past several years has increasingly been one of government encroachments in every area of life. For the average high school student, born at the end of the 1980s, there has never been a time when he has not been bombarded with the regular doses of PC thought control, the subversion of meaning through his education and the trash entertainment he encounters, diversity codes and “celebrations” of diversity, the circulation of the idea of “hate crimes” and the standard parade of shameful events, about which the white children must feel guilty and for which they must be contrite through political conformity, that passes for teaching history in most high schools. Add to that their own parents’ probably negligible grasp of firm constitutional principles, the current hysteria over terrorism and the general willingness to shun all discourse deemed ‘extremist’, and you have a recipe for civic implosion. Of course, it cannot help that these children are not being instructed in even the most basic elements of critical thinking.

The article’s remarks about the decline of student media are a cop-out. Any remotely literate young person can participate in criticism and debate, whether he has access to the Internet or not. In this age, when every teenager has more access to information and self-expression through technology than at any time before, there is no excuse for the abandonment of fundamental liberties on account of a ‘lack of practice’. As if ‘practicing’ fundamental liberties were necessary to maintain the conviction that no government should have the right to steal from free men what their fathers handed down to them! Of course, we’re not all that free anymore, but what little we have left is still worth preserving.

But where exactly are they going to learn to treasure them, when the man most of their parents elected subverts them at every turn and is incapable of inculcating a grasp of constitutional liberty beyond a Pavlovian gushing of sentimentality whenever the word ‘freedom’ is mentioned? The bumper sticker and saccharine patriotism they learn from their parents and politicians cannot teach them why they should treasure liberties, because they have no idea what was required to seize them and hold them, nor can they grasp that the government is their enemy to be feared and kept at bay as often as possible. Being raised in the days of the hegemony, it is little wonder that they lack the necessary contempt for government that keeps men free.

This is a generation of ultimate self-absorption, and the government exists to make things easier for them and keep them comfortable, and it is much, much easier to agree with the majoritarian view and damn all dissidents. There is no intellectual or moral rigour required to follow that route, rather than taking the harder road of defending the principle of free expression. The repressiveness of the lazy mind is an astonishing thing to behold, and I suspect we will see more of it as these high school students move out into the world. Whether they go to join the legions of dunces who parrot every ‘progressive’ catchphrase or the lobotomised masses who follow the siren-song of Murdoch and his minions, they will be the recruits of the machine that will devour what remains of real American liberty.

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