Values and Votes: A Letter to the Youth of America

This letter is addressed to young people, the youth of America, those people who are now termed GenZers and maybe even some who consider themselves millennials. You are the present and the future of America. This is true whether old folks like me acknowledge it or not. You are the people who are beginning to hold the positions of influence and power. You are now the majority of persons within these United States.

I  hope I may be bold enough to presume that you could possibly learn something from an old codger like me. If God wants, I will have attained my eightieth birthday by next spring. But once I was young, just like you. You have your own ideas about the world and how it should be run, how life is to be lived, and how the earth should be managed. You want to manage your own lives, male your own mistakes, have your own experiences. You feel you are brighter and more with it than the older generations, and that, after all, you are inheriting the earth. You want to go forward, not backward.

Perhaps it is to you young people that Ms. Harris is appealing when she directs her campaign thusly. But there is something none of us should discount in going forward. I speak of tradition in the sense of that which keeps us conserving the good that we learn from past experience. It is tradition that urges us to propel the good that we have garnered through our experience forward into the future generations.

What we have been handed down as a society, as a nation, as a species has been encoded in our law. In the United States, it has been enshrined in our Constitution and in our laws. And though we have undoubtedly grown without the benefit of perfection, we have been tending toward an increased sense of justice.

But I have seen this societal sense of tradition, this sense of those norms and values that are worthy of transmission to the succeeding generations, being eroded. In insidious ways, the very sense of law and order is being trivialized. There is, I think, something seriously hazardous to the underpinnings of society when laws are changed so that theft of property of less than a thousand dollars from a business establishment s may be done with impunity. There is, I believe, something terribly dangerous to the welfare of a society when petty criminals are released again and again to traffic  their crimes over and over without fear of just punishment. And there is, I know, something surly foreboding and threatening in the broadest sense, to a nation that ignores the laws that have served it well for centuries in favor of disposing itself to open borders, riotous protests, and the seemingly willful neglect of law enforcement in its major cities.

Group intelligence depends chiefly upon two major impulses. The impulse of language and the impulse of memory. Societal memory may be properly termed a sense of history. History, if it is to remain objective, must remember and record the facts of the past, the good as well as the bad. The record of the past includes written history, art and artifacts. To despoil statues of Confederate generals, ostensibly because they are believed to be on the wrong side of history, to trivialize the Founding Fathers of our nation and the amazing efforts they undertook to give birth to these United States because many of them were slave owners in a society where slavery had long been the norm in the larger world as well as the Western World, to punish segments of society for the transgressions of people that never were perfect in the past is foolhardy at best and dangerous at worst.

The impulse of language similarly governs group intelligence. The flippant use of words without clear regard for their meanings, meanings imbued by past events, can be similarly destructive. When Donald Trump is termed “Nazi,” with no real regard for the meaning of the term as it was known in the past, is to show scant awareness for the horrors that were wrought upon millions of persons in the middle of the twentieth century. Similarly, to call him a “Hitler,” without justification is to denigrate the Holocaust as a real phenomenon which visited horrors upon millions of people. Hillary Clinton’s use of the term “deplorables” with a similar lack of justification for an entire mass of persons, is similarly dangerous.Joe Biden’s reference to MAGA supporters as “dangerous”is itself dangerous as well.

“All people are created equal”, as our Declaration of Independence declares. This is the equality that derives from freedom, the freedom to be whatever we decide to be. Equity, which seeks to bring all human beings to the same level, is not equality. Everyone may begin in this equality, but they will not all end in this equality. By virtue of genetics, nurture and nature, some people become richer in money, others produce many children, still others great works of art or literature, some become great sports figures, still others inventors and explorers, others criminals and murderers.

Despite what may or may not be lacking in your education, you should all know this. Each of you was created an individual, free human being. It is my fervent belief that each one of you, each of us, is created by a Divine Source to be unique.  No  two fingerprints are exactly alike, no two faces, no two human beings. And I sincerely believe that each of us has been created to fulfill some unique purpose while on this earth. It is your task to find out what this is.

Our system of government, our economic system of free economic enterprise, while still evolving to perfection, offers each of you the best chance to succeed in finding your life’s purpose. It is a system built on the belief in individual liberty, on the freedom to develop ourselves uniquely, and to aspire to what has been termed “the American dream.”

We each need to perceive that we are free to find ourselves. We cannot do so if we are enslaved by economic chains that maintain us in groupthink uniformity, that depress groups of people in favor of others, that enable masses of people to persist in fear that terrorism, war and evil will hold sway.

The United States has, for generations now, been the beacon of the world. If we flourish, other nations will want to emulate us, not by seeking to overflow our borders, but striving to remain where they have come to be, finding their unique place and purpose in those societies.

If you want to fall into a mediocre country of mediocre people, mindless of how and where we have arrived as the American ideal, if you want to be overburdened by economic policies of group oppression, which will make everyone but the rich poor, if you want a nation that will stifle innovation and produce a lower standard of living for all, then, by all means, vote for Kamala Harris.

But if you want to participate in a nation that honors its tradition, learns from its mistakes, offers the world a safe-haven and a beacon against world-wide danger, a nation that remembers all the good traditions of the past, the source of its endowments, a nation that affords opportunity for you as individuals to develop your unique sense of purpose, get out and vote for Donald John Trump. And tell all your friends to do likewise. Do not be dismayed by age. I am almost eighty and I am writing this. Moses led the children of Israel out of Egypt at the same eighty-year mark. Respect and learn from your elders. Remember that, as you will be there too one day.

Everyone, in the final analysis, winds up equal – regardless of what they have done while on earth.  This is true despite how much money, education or fame they may or may not have obtained. In the end, we all have to pass from this life. Don’t you want to make your mark upon the world by finding your own unique purpose, the reason Divine Being brought you into being?

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