When I was in the 5th Grade, I lived in a neighborhood in Pflugerville, TX., that had all the makings of a small but growing town. I would walk down the street to my elementary school by myself, and when school was out, we'd leave the house to have free roam of the neighborhood. Even as I entered middle school, I would take the hike n' bike trail halfway across the town.
We were completely unattended by our parents. This was the '90s, so there were no cell phones for calling, texting, or tracking. If a parent wanted to know where we were, they'd have to call around to other parent's houses to find us, but there was never any guarantee that's where we'd be. If we wanted to go somewhere, we up and went.
We'd come home with scraped knees and elbows, sweaty, and dirty, and our parents would hardly flinch.
Nearly 30 years later that reality is gone. Cell phones have become digital leashes for kids that a parent can tug on when their anxiety gets too high. Not that kids can get too far without supervision anyway. If the wrong person sees your child alone, they can call CPS and get you into a world of hurt.
Even if your kids are playing in their own front yard unsupervised.
I often express my gratefulness for being born before the invention of the internet. Before then, stories meant to seize the people with terror were harder to come by. Kids could be freer then because the indoctrination of the media hadn't had the chance to fully set in, causing parents to keep their children unnecessarily close and monitored. I remember what freedom felt like, and it's a feeling that stuck with me in my adult years. To this day I abhor the feeling of someone looking over my shoulder, figuratively speaking.
Sadly, I'm not confident that younger generations than mine will understand that feeling. They've been kept corralled well past the age they should be. They're used to authority figures constantly watching and correcting. The only element of danger is one they can dream up since they'll never truly face any outside the protective cocoon of their guardians.
Being watched, judged, and guided by the hand is far more normal for them. Older millennials, like myself, and Gen X bristle at what younger generations consider just a part of everyday life.
But thinking about it for a moment, it makes the gravitation toward authority in the modern era and the complete lack of common sense far more understandable.
Younger generations are in far more reliance on authority for guidance and the authoritarians in our society are only too happy to utilize that to their advantage. The normalized presence of a big brother figure, plus reinforcement from the internet, makes for an individual who doesn't think too much of individualism.
Moreover, their lack of interaction with any real danger confuses them as to what danger might actually look like, and not only that, robs them of the necessary common sense to stay clear of or get out of that danger. This skewed perspective leads people to imagine dangers, having never truly experienced the freedom to encounter them before.
A ready submission to authority and a dearth of wisdom. Emotion over thinking. It all adds up to a simple fact.
Our nation is growing up as children. We're being infantilized and we're doing it to ourselves.
We're letting our fears guide us to the point where we've trained our children to be little risk-averse lemmings who just do what they're told because they don't know how to do it any other way. Naturally, this isn't all of us, but I think we can see pretty clearly that it's become too many.
If and when the authoritarians of the age come for America, future generations might not fight for it because they don't know how. They'll readily hand the nation over hoping for more of that guidance and oversight they're so used to.
Maybe that's just an oversimplification of some of the problems we're facing, but I think the infantilization of America is a large part of why we are where we are.
