Parents, step up

 Like every generation before us, we bemoan the current state of the younger generation.

And like every generation before us, it's our fault.

Go back a couple generations to those known as the "Silent Generation," and you find a group of men and women who grew up with a focus on work. Their parents knew the struggle of the Great Depression and the Great War, and the Silent Generation was taught to rely on themselves and their families. These are the ones who "walked uphill both ways" to school, the ones who often dropped out of school to work and help take care of the family.

They grew up and had kids, and many of them wanted to make things better for their kids. After all, their parents were hard on them, so they don't want to be so hard on their kids. The Silent Generation had to work hard, often missing out on the small joys of childhood because of the family responsibilities they had to take on, so they wanted to make sure life wasn't as hard for their kids. So the "Baby Boomers" came along, raised by parents who made sure their kids had a better childhood, then learned to work as teenagers. Most of this generation had jobs through high school, but they weren't relied on quite as much for paying family bills.

The Boomers, like all teenagers, thought their parents were too hard on them. So they decided to take a step back from being so controlling. They started asking their kids for their input into "family decisions." Working during the school year? How about a trade for just a summer job? They let their kids make more decisions, stay out later, have more "recreational time." They still understood the value of hard work and competition, so they pushed their kids to compete in anything and everything.

The Boomers raised Gen X , who--as is the nature of everybody's kids--thought their parents got this whole parenting-thing wrong. With this generation came the idea that competition was bad and that hurt feelings were unacceptable. Kids who grew up saying, "Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me," went on to raise kids with the idea that hurtful words were the end of the world. Instead of competing in sports, their kids played ballgames where nobody was allowed to keep score and everybody got a trophy. The generation who grew up having "Family Meetings" realized that they hadn't been prepared to make adult decisions as kids, so they chose the route of "Helicopter Parent," hovering around their children at all times, not allowing them to make any decisions.

That brings us to the Millennials, the generation raising kids today, Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Raised in a world where hurt feelings were seen as cruelty, this generation is making sure nobody ever says a cross word to their children. No one else is allowed to correct them, not even authority figures (like teachers) who have always been respected in the past. Instead of teaching kids how to take responsibility, Millennials are teaching their children that nothing is ever their fault. Instead of teaching truth, they are telling their kids that we don't really have a definition of truth... your truth is whatever you feel like, and anyone who disagrees with you must hate you.

Unfortunately, I'm part of the Millennials. My generation is failing those who come next, the kids who are growing up in a world of false reality, lies called truth, and a total brush off of responsibility. We are raising confused kids and playing along with their confusion, making them think it is "loving" to affirm someone's dangerous, ruinous delusions. We are setting our children up to fail, then we are wondering why they do exactly what we pushed them into. Kids who never had to deal with the consequences of their actions in high school--who never had to honor deadlines, could redo assignments as many times as they wanted, had assignments shortened, tests read to them, and answers given to them--are going to college where (for now, at least) professors are still able to actually teach. These students are failing out of college the first semester, and nobody seems to understand why. Kids who have gone through their lives with no rules, no responsibilities, no guidelines, and no supervision are making decisions that ruin their lives and the lives of people around them, and for some reason my generation can't understand what went wrong.

So I'm talking to my peers when I say this: Parents, it's time for you to step up.

• Set boundaries for your kids.
• When they do something wrong, make them face the consequences.
• Stop blaming other people for your kid's failures.
• If your child doesn't do an assignment and gets a zero, it isn't the teacher's fault. In fact, back up the teachers at home. Grades that aren't up to your child's abilities? Your kid should lose privileges at home.
• Put limits on screen time, then enforce them.
• Refuse to go along with delusions.
• Don't support bad decisions.
• Stop coddling teenagers when it's your job to raise them to be responsible men and women in just a few short years.
• Teach them the importance of responsibility.
• Show them the value of truth and the danger of lies.
• Make sure they understand that "progress" only matters if it is headed in the right direction.
• Take them to church.
• Make them do chores.
• Set high expectations.
• Teach them to be respectful of others, then expect that behavior.
• Show them that they are supposed to do the right thing, even when it's hard.
  
  
  We've let things go too far to think we can fix everything, but maybe we can still teach the next generation enough that they will do better than we did. We should fall on our knees, ask God's forgiveness for how we've failed our kids, then rise up and start trying to set things right.
  

live not by lies

Lies surround us. That in itself isn't a surprising thing--Satan has used lies since the Garden. Not so long ago, I wrote, "Lies don't have to be silenced. The truth is much stronger than the lies, and even if truth is whispered while lies are shouted from the rooftops the truth will always win out in the end." I'm not surprised by the lies that are being spewed out by so-called journalists who seem to have just become talking heads who read what is handed to them instead of researching and studying and delving into matters deemed newsworthy. I'm not surprised that lies are being fed to our children through the media they consume--movies, books, television shows, and social platforms that feed them a constant diet of "self-affirmation" and "live your truth."

What I am surprised by is how many of us are just standing idly by, letting the lies take over.

I've been guilty of it myself, way too many times than I want to admit. I've let what has seemed at the time like an "unimportant" lie slip by without making an attempt to counter it. After all, like I wrote a few years ago, the truth will win out in the end, right?

The problem is, the truth isn't even being whispered.

"And they put whomever they want on trial, and brand the healthy as mentally ill—and it is always “they,” while we are—helpless.

We are approaching the brink; already a universal spiritual demise is upon us; a physical one is about to flare up and engulf us and our children, while we continue to smile sheepishly and babble:

“But what can we do to stop it? We haven’t the strength.”

We have so hopelessly ceded our humanity that for the modest handouts of today we are ready to surrender up all principles, our soul, all the labors of our ancestors, all the prospects of our descendants—anything to avoid disrupting our meager existence. We have lost our strength, our pride, our passion. We do not even fear a common nuclear death, do not fear a third world war (perhaps we’ll hide away in some crevice), but fear only to take a civic stance! We hope only not to stray from the herd, not to set out on our own, and risk suddenly having to make do without the white bread, the hot water heater, a [...] residency permit."

Those words were written by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and released on the day he was arrested and stripped of his Soviet citizenship--for warning about the dangers of Communism. 

That is where we find ourselves today, right now. We are watching our country slip away from us, down the short path to socialism and communism, and we are doing nothing. Too many of us are going along with the steady stream of lies, choosing to say we no longer believe the truth. 

"You can choose not to believe it's cold outside, but it won't raise the temperature." ~Pastor Allen Jackson

It was Mary Flannery O'Connor who once wrote, "The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it." We can pretend like God's word changes with the times, that His truth is dependent on the current state of society or the latest cultural trend--but that doesn't make the belief true.

God's moral rules for life haven't changed. He still knows what's best, what leads to life and what leads to death. We can try to paint Him in whatever light we wish, but it doesn't change who He is.

"Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow of turning." (James 1:17)

So what do we do? In a world that is sprinting the wrong direction and calling it "progress," a world that is feeding our children a steady diet of lies, a world that seems to be spinning completely out of control, what can we do?

Solzhenitsyn has a suggestion:

"It demands of us only a submission to lies, a daily participation in deceit—and this suffices as our fealty.

And therein we find, neglected by us, the simplest, the most accessible key to our liberation: a personal nonparticipation in lies! Even if all is covered by lies, even if all is under their rule, let us resist in the smallest way: Let their rule hold not through me!

And this is the way to break out of the imaginary encirclement of our inertness, the easiest way for us and the most devastating for the lies. For when people renounce lies, lies simply cease to exist. Like parasites, they can only survive when attached to a person.

We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think—this is scary, we are not ready. But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!

This is the way, then, the easiest and most accessible for us given our deep-seated organic cowardice, much easier than (it’s scary even to utter the words) civil disobedience à la Gandhi.

Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies! Having understood where the lies begin (and many see this line differently)—step back from that gangrenous edge! Let us not glue back the flaking scales of the Ideology, not gather back its crumbling bones, nor patch together its decomposing garb, and we will be amazed how swiftly and helplessly the lies will fall away, and that which is destined to be naked will be exposed as such to the world.

And thus, overcoming our temerity, let each man choose: Will he remain a witting servant of the lies (needless to say, not due to natural predisposition, but in order to provide a living for the family, to rear the children in the spirit of lies!), or has the time come for him to stand straight as an honest man, worthy of the respect of his children and contemporaries?"