My Peers

My habib ti and I were walking through the mall a few days ago, I was needing to by some new reading material, and it's a chance for us to do a little walking and such. We went to Old Navy to get some thermal undershirts because it is terribly cold in California. (As a matter of fact, I have a score to settle with the Beach Boys for the image they gave me)

As we're looking through the normal person's clothes (I.E. not the 0-6 size range) this girl walks up and says, "What is this, the maternity section?" Now, this girl was no size 6 herself, but seemed to be one of those people who think that the world owes them something.

A few minutes later, we go to check out. There is one line, and four registers because it was a large sale, and quite a few people were there. As one register opened, they'd call the next in line. Well, this same girl goes up to a register, ignoring the line. She looks back at the line, makes a nasty face and continues standing in the line, because obviously she was more important than anyone else who was there.

It got me to thinking. These are people my age, I'm 21. I look around and it scares me to think that these are the people I'm going to have to count on to vote for me. A vast majority of my peers might be going to college, but anyone who has ever seen Jaywalking on the Tonight Show knows that quite a few of them are completely oblivious to the world around them. Many couldn't point out Iraq on a map even though a population of Americans large enough to fill a sizable town reside there. Nor could they tell you where Korea, or Iran, or many other countries of significance are.

And this attitude of blissful ignorance doesn't stop outside the world, but even in our own borders. It isn't just one subset of our youth, it is something that has infected our nation on a massive scale. Priorities for kids 18-24 these days seem to be insane. Then again, with the role models we have in Hollywood and sports these days, I guess it shouldn't come as such a shock.

Sometimes I just want to shake them and say, "Wake up! Don't you see that the world you live in is steadily sliding into World War III! Don't you see that because of your lack of involvement youthful ideas are not being introduced into our government! Can't you understand the vital role that we must play as a generation in order to continue a stable existence for our children when we have them!"

I don't mean that as "Armageddon" talk or the end of the world, but the entire world is wobbling on a knife's edge, and we could be plunged into a massive conflict overnight. Hindsight is 20/20, they say. They traced the origins of WWI to a single assassination. WWII was spelled out clearly by Hitler while he was in prison. Will they trace this one back to 9/11/2001? Or perhaps even so far back as 1979? Maybe they could even trace it back to the end of the Ottoman empire, and Britain's betrayal of the likes of T.E. Lawrence...

The next world war will not be a war like we have fought in the past. There will be large battles, but the book on guerilla warfare is revised everyday in the streets of Baghdad and the hills of Afghanistan, and it will be used. The closest thing to it would be to think of fighting Japan in WWII, if we had actually been forced to invade the mainland.

But the American spirit has been strong, from the darkest days of the Revolution forward. We have always managed, even coming into a fight ill-prepared, to fight a good fight. But in WWII when that happened, it was a generation of hard workers with a sense of national pride. Today it is a generation that thinks their votes don't count, with a large majority of them hating the government in general, and associating that anger with their country. It will be a rude awakening to say the least.