"Kids have it easy?" Think again!

Matt Walsh writes,

Do you know what “unfunded liability” means? It means, in economic terms, “hey junior, this bill is on you, sucker!” It means we’re ordering a feast, stuffing our fat faces, and leaving our kids to pay the tab. We think kids are selfish “me first” little brats, but that title belongs to us. Look at what we’ve done to this country; we barely even give these kids a chance. Where are the people stepping up to make sacrifices today so that future generations won’t be stuck with the debt and bankruptcy caused by our extravagance? Do you hear this voice? I don’t. All I hear is “spend money on ME! NOW!” Me. Now.

Me. Now.

Me. Now.

If there are two words that will define our culture, those are it.

But what about our kids? Don't they have it easy?

More than 50 percent of all children are exposed to hardcore pornography before the age of eleven. Eleven. By thirteen, the vast majority have seen it; many of them are full-on addicts. Meanwhile, schools are giving kids condom demonstrations, and the FDA is making sure your 15 year old daughter can get her hands on the Morning After Pill without your consent. Everywhere your child turns, he is assaulted with sex, perversion and nihilism. Your 12 year old son can sit at a computer, open a browser, punch in a few key words, and plunge right into a world of depravity, debauchery and darkness. Not only can he do this, but, statistically, he probably is. If you let him have a computer in his room and unlimited internet access on his phone, you’ve increased the odds exponentially. That’s a tragedy, because he’ll never be the same after he takes that first trip into the pornographic bowels of the internet. He’s been molested — maybe not physically, but mentally and spiritually.

So our kids are shielded from the good but hard lessons of life, while being exposed to a constant stream of sex, deviance and insanity. They have their innocence and purity ripped out of their souls, but it isn’t replaced with maturity and wisdom. Instead, toxic waste fills the void; all of these weird images — and the confusing feelings they bring to the surface — have nowhere to go, so they just bounce around in your son’s skull all day. He doesn’t know what to do with it or how to process it. Ten years later, he’s sitting across the kitchen table from Chris Hanson, trying to explain why he’s only 22 but already “bored” with healthy sexuality, so he’s moved on to violent fetishes and pedophilia.

What about bullying?

Our kids are wrecked by bullying, and we don’t understand why. Even worse, our kids ARE bullies, and we chalk it up to a “phase,” or just “kids being kids.” Schools make rules against it, state’s pass laws criminalizing it, but bullying persists. According to a recent study, it actually gets worse the more we try to outlaw it. Maybe that isn’t so shocking. If laws can’t keep crack and guns out of the hands of violent felons, how could laws be expected to keep unfriendly thoughts out of the heads of pubescent middler schoolers?

Our children are torn from our grasp by a combination of the school system, the media, advertising, the internet, government interference, and pop culture. They begin to look to their peers for guidance and direction, rather than their parents. They plant their roots in shallow, rocky soil, and it doesn’t take much more than a stiff wind to blow them over. They become desperate. They search for validation in the chaotic mass of confused, broken adolescents, and they never find it. “Bullying” usually doesn’t manifest itself by wedgies and spitballs, like in corny 80′s movies. Bullying — the worst and most effective kind — can be nothing more than a glance, a rejection, a whisper. It’s your daughter reaching out to her peer for affirmation, and getting a snide look and a vicious insult in its place. It’s not the snide look and the vicious insult that’s a new phenomenon; it’s the fact that our kids are so helplessly vulnerable to it. Kids spend all day at school searching for meaning through peer approval, and now it doesn’t even end when the bell rings. They go home and paste themselves to their phones and laptops, rejecting the unconditional love from their parents, in favor of “likes” and Retweets.

It’s not their fault. This is the society we built for them. We are to blame.

I know I’ve just spend several paragraphs painting a bleak picture, but it’s a picture we can’t ignore any longer. I wish I could wrap this up with a quick and easy solution. I can’t. All I can say is that we need to hold our children close. We have to give them love and point them towards God. People say you shouldn’t be too “protective.” I disagree. Be protective. Use your body as a human shield against the lies and evil that surround them. We have to show them that nothing is more important than faith and family. Nothing. Everything in the universe comes as a distant second. But we can’t really demonstrate this unless we keep our families together in the first place.

And that’s probably a good place to start.

Just don’t say that kids have it easy. Kids have never had it harder, and the least we can do is acknowledge that fact.