40% of Gen Z Identifies as LBGT... Gee, What Might Cause That?

 I was shocked not long ago when I read a piece on the Newsweek website. The headline read “Nearly 40 Percent of U.S. Gen Zs, 30 Percent of Young Christians Identify as LGBTQ, Poll Shows”. That, aside from Joe Biden providing free crack pipes to help address racial inequality, is the most absurd thing I may have ever read. Not so much for the data itself per se, but rather, an illustration of exactly how malleable (and lost) young Americans are.

Whatever the natural percentage of LGBT etc. people in the United States is, it’s sure in hell not 40%. It’s probably closer to low single digits. Whatever it actually is, somehow with the left’s championing the of the rainbow, magically 40% of young people identify with it… not tolerate it, not say no problem with it, not even say, good for them, but against the tide of tens of thousands of years of human history, are now, or at least “identify” as, LBGT etc. That tells you a lot about the state of America today.

That so many young adults are so confused about sexual attraction, one of the most basic and important elements of life, one that most people never even have to question because it’s largely written in our genes, tells you quite a bit about how absurd America has become.

Guaranteed you won’t find this absurdity in nations where people struggle for food, water, shelter and freedom. Guaranteed you won’t find this absurdity in nations where war or terrorism or narco violence is an everyday concern. But you do here, because the United States had done such a spectacular – albeit imperfect – job of meeting the basic needs of life and providing unprecedented prosperity for most Americans that we have 40 million or more young people who have the luxury of navel gazing themselves out of the most basic of biological truths. And just to be clear, these aren’t children, they’re young adults born between 1984 & 2002, or between 20 & 38 years old.

How exactly does that happen? The first prerequisite is fulfillment of life’s basic needs. While we hear stories of poverty and desperation daily in the media, the reality is that most Americans do not struggle to attain the basic needs of life, food, water, shelter, and based on the birthrates of the poorest Americans, companionship. While there are no doubt exceptions to that – as there always are about virtually everything – the reality is that even the poor in the United States live better than the average European.

Beyond those there are myriad opportunities for folly, and in America there is a great deal of that. Much of it is driven by the media / academia / high tech cabal that passes for the intelligentsia in America and is increasingly abetted by big business.

My favorite quote of all time is Voltaire who said “Perfect is the enemy of the good.” Twenty First Century America is that quote incarnate. Rather than reinforcing the basic principles that laid the foundation for American success, things like Christianity, limited government, individual liberty & responsibility, freedom and capitalism, today the intelligentsia cabal spend their time attacking those things in the name of “doing better” or “diversity” or “inclusion”. Online and off they showcase everything in opposition to those values. And it’s never enough to welcome “marginalized” groups into the narrative, rather the culture that built America and the 70% of America that is still white must be demolished: Whites are racist. Capitalism rewards the rich at the expense of the poor. Women earn $.77 to a man’s $1.00. The Founding Fathers were racists and frontier settlers too. Systemic racism keeps minorities in poverty. Republicans hate blacks, immigrants, the poor and the elderly. America was founded to protect slavery, the flag is a symbol of racism and the Pledge of Allegiance is indoctrination into the cult. And of course Aunt Jemima was a symbol of racism and Dr. Seuss books too. Virtually anything traditional in American history is in the crosshairs.

The list of complaints never stops as the victim classes continue to grow, to the point that – no doubt taking their cue from Senator Pocahontas – a third of white students lied about being part of a minority group to improve their chances of acceptance into or gaining financial aid for college!

It is this swamp of equity, “anti-racism”, inclusion and infinite pronouns that today’s young people have grown up . From fake news and safe spaces to woke Madison Avenue and endless Kardashians it’s no wonder they’re confused. With proto CRT movements evolving everywhere from schools and the Pentagon to the Boy Scouts and corporate boardrooms, questioning pretty much everything about life seems almost normal. Gone from sight are “toxic” masculinity, “feminine” beauty, nuclear families and much of what defined America for more than two centuries. In their place are messages that men can get pregnant, hard work and math are racist and human activity is destroying the planet.

While these anti-American and anti-science messages have taken off recently, utterly devoid of common sense as they might be, the vapid culture they dominate today has been in the making for decades, going back to participation trophies, gay scout masters, unisex dorms and welfare programs that ballooned broken families.

And so today we find ourselves in a place where almost half of America’s young people question something almost as fundamental as gravity. They look in the mirror and are not sure who is looking back at them… a boy, a girl or somehow someone in between. That is neither normal nor healthy, for the individuals or society. But of course we’re not allowed to say that… because it’s nature, everyone is different and everyone has the right to decide who they want to be. While ostensibly that is true, in practice just because something happens in nature doesn’t make it normal. Siamese twins happen in nature as do serial killers, but neither is what we would consider normal or desirable.

For years young people have been getting the message in the media and in schools that there are no objective truths, that everything is up for debate, from free speech and capitalism to which gender they are. For ideas, such debates make sense and can help strengthen convictions or prompt evolution, which is the whole point. For biology, sexual attraction and the sense of self, for almost everyone such debates are absurd and introduce unnecessary confusion where none really exists.

The world is a complex place with literally millions of stimuli impacting us every day. Handling the intricacies of daily life as a young person is a challenge in the best of circumstances. Our foundations of biology and puberty and sexual attraction both add to those challenges and help us deal with them. From desire and anticipation to risk and rejection, at the critical years of adolescence few things are more important than having a firm grip on one’s sense of self and attraction. It’s into this maelstrom of youth that the left has introduced a malignant, unnecessary confusion that has 40% of America’s young people unsure about exactly who they are. When you don’t know who’s looking back at you in the morning it’s hard to deal with the challenges of life, nevermind persevere and overcome them. That confusion will have extraordinary consequences for these young people and for society, and none of them will be good.

Clarity of Government Purpose - Potentially the Silver Lining Behind of the Ebola Cloud

When the Ebola scare is done the damage it will have done is likely to be far more reaching than just the individual victims themselves. Of all of the things the government is supposed to do, protecting its citizens is likely very close to the top in most people’s minds.

Indeed, government is supposed to do for citizens that which they cannot or choose not to do for themselves – limited of course to those things it has been constitutionally empowered to do. National defense being the prime example. Others include the court system, international treaties, tax policies, etc. Americans have not traditionally – at least for the country’s first 150 years – looked to government to become the provider of all things or the solver of all problems.

Today, for a large part of the population that is no longer true. Whenever something bad happens, they look for government to fix it. A sluggish economy, high unemployment, a failed automobile manufacturer, you’ve lost your job, you can’t get insurance, you can’t support your kids or you want to build a new stadium, look to government for a solution. Or, competitors are eating away at your natural monopoly, your kid can’t read, you think the CEO makes too much money, you haven’t paid your water bill in months and the water company has turned off your service… look to the government for a solution. Usually these solutions come about in the form or a check or government using its police power to force other people to do your bidding.

The result of government spread so wide, doing so many things, having its tentacles in virtually every aspect of American life is that not only does it do a bad job at practically everything, it often fails spectacularly at those limited things it’s supposed to be doing in the first place.

The Ebola situation is the perfect example, writ large. Ebola is a disease in that until recently was largely confined to Africa. While Ebola is not the continent’s largest killer, what makes it somewhat unique in that it kills 70% or more of the people who catch it, usually within a few weeks. And, we don’t really know how it’s transmitted, but we know that coming into contact with a carrier – even after they are dead – or their body fluids can transmit it. Can it be transmitted by mosquitoes? We’re told no, but viruses mutate. Can it be become airborne – thorough say, sneezing? The goalposts seem to be moving. Can it be transmitted by touching objects a carrier has touched? Don’t know for sure.

Ebola has, by everyone’s measure, the potential to become a true epidemic. As such, Ebola might be one of those things that most Americans agree is rightly a government interest, something the government should be focusing on and doing what it can to inform and protect citizens.

Unfortunately, thus far the government’s action has been an abysmal failure, beginning with Barack Obama’s inexplicable decision against imposing a travel ban from the nations where Ebola is raging, and his September 16th assurance that the chances of Ebola reaching American shores were “extremely low”. Four days later US patient zero, Thomas Eric Duncan, landed in Dallas from Liberia.

A week later Duncan was in a Dallas Hospital with Ebola. Since then, two nurses who treated Duncan have come down with the disease. When the first nurse, Nina Pham, came down with Ebola, CDC director Tom Frieden suggested it was her failure to follow protocol that caused her contraction. Later it turned out that Ms. Pham had followed all protocols from the CDC, the same agency that in August said: U.S. hospitals can safely manage patients with Ebola disease.

A month in, confusion reigns. The CDC goes from reassuring the public that Ebola requires contact with a victim and is not a respiratory ailment spread like the flu, to later warning that just standing within three feet of an infected person poses a risk. At the same time news emerges that Amber Vinson, the second nurse to treat Duncan, was told she was OK to fly by the CDC after calling to report her possible symptoms. Later CDC Director Tom Frieden stated that she should not have flown.

While all of this chaos is going on, politics rears its head when the administration and Democrats suggest the GOP is to blame for having called for budget cuts. Then it emerges that not only did the GOP give both the CDC and NIH more money than requested by the president, but that the agencies had wasted tens or hundreds of millions of dollars studying things like the propensity of lesbians to be fat, the impact of TVs and gas generators on a village in Vietnam, and what bus riders thought of HIV videos. Indeed, over the course of 5 years the CDC spent more than $2.6 billion on HIV and AIDS grants that the agency itself admitted: “have no objectives” or were otherwise useless.

What the Ebola crisis is putting on full display for the American people is the malfeasance and ineptness of a government that takes $3 trillion of their money each year yet can’t seem to get the basic things right. One doesn’t need a PhD in biology to understand that making it more difficult to travel to the US from a country infected with this virus is a good thing. One doesn’t need to be a rocket scientist that recognize that millions allocated for health research shouldn’t be wasted replacing perfectly good furniture or buildings. It doesn’t take a 140 IQ to understand that a person recently exposed to a deadly virus shouldn’t be given the OK to fly on a commercial jet. But in modern day America, that’s how government operates – or as in the case of a travel ban… doesn’t.

If the government is making horrendously bad decisions, providing conflicting and inaccurate information and wasting billions of taxpayer dollars in an area that literally involves life and death, and one that is playing out on the front pages of every newspaper in the country, just imagine how badly their mismanaging everything else they are doing from the mundane to the obscure, most of which is played out behind closed doors with the help of cronies and lobbyists and political financiers. Maybe the silver lining of the Ebola cloud will be the long overdue recognition by a majority of Americans that not only is government not the solution for everything that might go wrong, but maybe it’s meddling failures are behind many of things that go wrong in the first place.