Dean Barnetts 911 Generation - Road to the Middle Class

WE KNOW all about the Boomer generation, says 40-ish Dean Barnett. Forty years ago, they (that is, we, since I’m a boomer) checked out of their generational challenge.

Confronted with a generation-defining conflict, the cold war, the Boomers—those, at any rate, who came to be emblematic of their generation—took the opposite path from their parents during World War II.

But now we have the 9/11 generation. And it is starting to look as if it is very different. Barnett has been taking a look at the young people signing up for the armed forces and he likes what he sees.

Some of these men have Ivy League degrees; all of them are talented and intelligent individuals who... could have chosen to do anything with their lives.

Something about the culture has changed. Barnett speaks about a young man who graduated recently from Harvard and obtained a commission in the United States Marine Corps.

After his commissioning, this freshly minted United States Marine returned to his Harvard dorm room to clean it out.

As he entered the dorm in his full dress uniform, some of his classmates gave him a spontaneous round of applause. A campus police officer took him aside to shake his hand. His father observed, "It was like something out of a movie."

So what is it about these young men? LTC Kurt Schlichter of the California National Guard has an answer:

"The direction comes from themselves. They like to be challenged."

Here’s another idea. After the cultural revolution of the last half century young men have discovered that they have a real problem in choosing and living a life that has meaning. Men have been marginalized and scapegoated out of their respected roles and fathers and providers and they have been forbidden to complain.

But what young men can do is what they have always been able to do. They can offer themselves and their lives in the defense of the nation’s women and children.

Things haven’t changed that much after all.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Civil Society

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Francis Fukuyama, Trust

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Herbert Spencer, The Man Versus the State

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Never Trust Experts

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Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
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