OPINION:
Generation Citizen, an educational organization funded by the likes of the Bezos Family Foundation, the Soros Foundation and the George Kaiser Family Foundation, just issued its annual report. And what, pray tell, do these billionaires have in store for us, you ask? Well, in addition to promoting “action civics,” aka a neo-Marxist curriculum focused on teaching “over 1 million students” the wonders of victimization rather than virtue, these smart folks are now calling on the nation to lower the federal voting age to 16.
Yes, you read that correctly — 16!
Aside from arguing that men can now get pregnant and that 21st-century women no longer have a right to their own restrooms, this has to be one of the dumbest things ever uttered by our progressive betters.
Seriously, can anyone who has ever been around an adolescent (or been one, for that matter) possibly think this is a good idea? There’s a reason we have laws against teenagers doing things like buying cigarettes, drinking alcohol, consenting to marriage or voting, and the reason is, as Bill Maher has so aptly put it: “They’re stupid.”
In “Grow Up! Life Isn’t Safe, but It’s Good,” I make the point in spades that ideas have consequences, and the consequences of dumbing down the distinction between adults and children are perilous. I sound the alarm over and over again that education today is in crisis. I give one example after another of how the contemporary academy no longer pursues truth but seems more interested in celebrating tolerance. I warn of the rising ideological fascism that now stands on the grave of education’s proud tradition of academic freedom. And I share story after story of how the result of all this is a nation of perpetual Greta Thunbergs who look frighteningly like the minions from Orwell’s Ministry of Truth, whose sole mission is to protect their infantile propaganda rather than dare let anyone challenge it.
A voting populace that worships feelings over facts is a dangerous one. If the “adults” going to the polls are indistinguishable from precocious children, we are in trouble. If we’re trusting the presidency to those still prone to emotional outbursts when their parents ask them to do the dishes, we might as well hand the keys to the White House over to the Taliban.
It is hard to believe that intelligent people like those running the Bezos and Soros family foundations could come up with something as dumb as giving voting rights to 16-year-olds. This is literal nonsense, for it makes no sense. It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. Progressives should know better, but they have been drinking their own Kool-Aid for so long that they have come to believe their lies. For all practical purposes, these elites have become the poster children of the problem. They have Peter Pan syndrome. They’ve never grown up. They’re living a lie.
M. Scott Peck warned of this. He called it the “diabolical human mind.” My old friend and colleague Graham Walker did likewise when he wrote “The Pathology of the Intellect.” The Apostle Paul calls it the reprobate mind. The message is the same from all three. Children make stuff up. Adolescents lie, and they have no reason to change if no one ever challenges them to leave Neverland. Another way to say this is that no one grows up if the benefits of adulthood are given to them rather than earned. Childhood fantasies are always more comfortable than the painful reality of living like an adult. Or as Paul challenged the church of Corinth: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. But when I became a man, I set aside childish ways. … I grew up!”
The solution to all this is pretty simple. It’s found in respect for maturity and the old truths — the moral and intellectual laws that have been tested by time, defended by reason, validated by experience and endowed to us by our Creator. This is what adulthood looks like, and it eschews the chronological snobbery of youth.
The answer to all that ails us is surely not to humor the adolescent arrogance of the billionaire boys club or to give adult authority to a bunch of hormone-driven teenagers who not only don’t understand a word I just said but who, instead, wail and whine, “You offended me and made me feel unsafe,” when we dared to say it!
Giving the right to vote to a bunch of confused, naval-gazing 16-year-olds who just forgot to take out the garbage for the umpteenth time is insane.
• Everett Piper (dreverettpiper.com, @dreverettpiper), a columnist for The Washington Times, is a former university president and radio host.
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