Predators Among the Sheep

Segment #1028

When you look at too many young Americans today, you have to ask an uncomfortable question: Have we raised a generation of sheep and then released them into a world full of wolves? We have sheltered them from failure, protected them from consequences, emphasized self-esteem over self-reliance, and too often taught them what to think rather than how to think. Then we handed much of their intellectual and emotional development to smartphones, algorithms, influencers and ideological echo chambers. The result is a generation with unprecedented access to information but often too little experience and judgment to distinguish wisdom from manipulation. That makes them ripe for predators—the manipulative boyfriend, charismatic guru, political extremist, online influencer, financial scammer or anyone else who recognizes naïveté and knows how to exploit it. Wealth and education are no guarantee of protection; sometimes privilege and insulation from the real world make the vulnerability worse.

We helped create this problem, and another lecture or college course isn't going to solve it. Young Americans need experience, responsibility, consequences and purpose. Put them to work beside people they didn't choose, from backgrounds they don't share, doing something real for people who depend upon them. That is the case for universal national service—not necessarily the military, but disaster relief, conservation, hospitals, elder care, infrastructure, schools, the Peace Corps or other meaningful service. And universal must mean universal: rich and poor, prep school and public school, Harvard-bound and trade-school-bound, the senator's child and the mechanic's child. If we want fewer sheep, we have to stop raising them in pens. Open the gate. Give them responsibility. Give them purpose. One country. One obligation. Everybody serves.

The Price of Citizenship: Why Every American Should Serve

There is a peculiar vulnerability that comes from growing up protected from consequences.

Combine entitlement with affluence, ideological insulation, and very little experience with people outside your own social world, and you can produce a remarkably naïve adult. Intelligence doesn't necessarily protect against it. Neither does money. In some cases, privilege may make the problem worse.

You can be a wealthy celebrity surrounded by advisers and still exercise terrible judgment about whom to trust. You can be the child of prosperous parents, graduate from an expensive university with a fashionable degree, and know almost nothing about how most Americans actually live and work. You may have spent eighteen or twenty-two years surrounded largely by people who share your assumptions, vocabulary, politics, and social class.

That isn't preparation for the world. It is insulation from it.

And predators thrive on naïveté.

That is one reason America should seriously reconsider universal national service.

Everybody Serves

The important word is universal.

Not poor kids. Not kids who can't afford college. Not immigrants trying to prove their patriotism. Not simply the young men and women who already volunteer for the armed forces.

Everybody.

The graduate of Phillips Exeter serves beside the graduate of a struggling public high school. The senator's daughter serves beside the plumber's son. The future investment banker works beside the future mechanic. The aspiring artist, engineer, farmer, lawyer and Gender Studies graduate all participate.

No buying your way out. No parental connections. No fashionable exemption for people whose families know the right people.

Service becomes part of citizenship.

That does not mean compulsory military service. America needs far more than soldiers.

Young Americans could spend a year or more in the military, disaster response, conservation, elder care, infrastructure projects, hospitals, schools, emergency services, assistance to people with disabilities, border and customs support where appropriate, or other public-service programs. Some could serve overseas through an expanded Peace Corps; many more could serve in communities far removed from the ones in which they grew up.

The objective isn't cheap labor.

The objective is citizenship education through experience.

Break the Bubble

One of America's great problems is that we increasingly live in bubbles.

We attend different schools, inhabit different neighborhoods, watch different media, work in different industries and sometimes seem to possess entirely different conceptions of the country.

Universities were once supposed to broaden students' horizons. Too often they can do the opposite, concentrating young people among peers who have similar educational backgrounds and increasingly specialized intellectual assumptions.

National service could disrupt that.

Imagine what happens when an affluent eighteen-year-old from Manhattan spends a year working on a flood-recovery project in Louisiana alongside someone from rural Oklahoma. Or when a young Texan who has never traveled outside the Southwest works with people from Boston, Detroit and Los Angeles. Or when someone headed for an Ivy League university spends twelve months caring for elderly Americans who live on Social Security.

They might discover that Americans they had been taught to regard as abstractions are actually human beings.

They might also learn something considerably more basic: show up on time, do unpleasant work, take instructions, solve problems, cooperate with people you don't particularly like, and understand that the world does not reorganize itself around your preferences.

Those are valuable lessons whether you eventually become a carpenter or a corporate CEO.

Rights Come With Obligations

Americans talk constantly about rights. We talk considerably less about obligations.

Citizenship shouldn't merely be something inherited at birth and thereafter treated as an unlimited package of benefits. A functioning republic depends upon citizens who possess some sense of responsibility for maintaining it.

Previous generations encountered that obligation through war, military service, the draft, farms, factories, churches, civic organizations and communities in which different classes of people interacted routinely. Much of that common civic infrastructure has disappeared.

Perhaps we need to build a new version deliberately.

A universal service requirement would say something simple:

You belong to this country, and for a short period of your life, the country has the right to ask something of you in return.

The wealthy don't escape it. The politically connected don't escape it. Conservatives don't escape it. Progressives don't escape it. Nobody gets an exemption because he has a better college waiting or because her parents can hire a lawyer.

Everybody serves.

It Might Produce Better Adults

National service wouldn't eliminate stupidity, entitlement, ideological fanaticism or bad judgment. Nothing will.

But it might expose young Americans to reality before they enter adulthood convinced that their particular corner of America represents the entire world.

It could introduce sheltered young people to hardship without destroying them, privilege without demonizing it, authority without worshipping it, disagreement without treating opponents as enemies, and responsibility without expecting applause.

Most importantly, it would force Americans from radically different backgrounds to encounter one another as individuals rather than stereotypes.

Maybe that is what the country needs most.

Before we send another generation into universities, corporations, government, media and the professions to tell the rest of us how the world works, perhaps we should require them to spend a year actually working in it.

One country. One obligation. Everybody serves.

That may be a price of citizenship worth paying.

I think “One country. One obligation. Everybody serves.” is the strongest formulation of your idea. It makes the argument about civic responsibility rather than turning it into an attack exclusively on one political or social class.