Making the click-through worthwhile: Why there’s no need for despair about your life, yet no point in looking for reassurance from the morning headlines; the summit with North Korea has been canceled, and that’s not such a bad thing; why NFL players don’t care if they’re denounced for kneeling during the National Anthem; and finally, the Washington Capitals give the nation’s capital a good reason to cheer.
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love America’s Idiots
David French looks at the declining birth rate in America and wonders if we’re a country that is slowly succumbing to despair:
According to Psychology Today, “the average high school kid today has the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient in the early 1950s.”
I must confess that, as the parent of two teenagers, none of this surprises me. I talk to my kids’ parents. I know their friends and peers. And while there are notable exceptions to every trend, theirs is not a generation characterized by hope and joy. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard parents ask a version of this key question: “Were we this sad when we were young?”
Earlier in the week, I described the myriad stresses of modern life as a teenager. But despair seems like an excessive response.
You can’t control what happens to you; you can only control how you respond to what happens. At some point, you have to decide whether you’re going to let the rest of the world — events and people you have no control over — dictate your mood and outlook on life.
You cannot look to the morning headlines for affirmation. For the rest of your life, when you look at a newspaper (presuming they’re around much longer) or web site or watch television, you’re going to hear about someone doing something dumb. That’s just baked in the cake of the human experience. There will always be a “Florida Man” doing something reckless, insane, or unbelievably stupid. The morning news shows will always eagerly tell you about drunk airline passengers urinating on seats, running naked down the aisles, or punching deaf pregnant women and service dogs. If talking heads ever stop saying controversial things on cable news, Mediaite will go out of business.
The world is full of a lot of stupid people. Some people learn from experience, but a lot of people refuse to learn from painful experience. They double down, and usually end up stepping on a rake again — and usually they find an inventive new way to believe that it was somebody else’s fault.
People in this country vote for a lot of doofuses that I wouldn’t trust with a weed whacker, never mind the levers of power in government. College students take on massive debts and then choose to major in fields of study that guarantee long odds of full-time employment. Our Mona Charen made a good observation about all of those commencement speeches urging graduates to go out and change the world:
High-school and college graduates don’t know very much about the world. Maybe before they set out to change things, they should get a good grasp of how things actually work. Ask them the difference between term- and whole-life insurance, or how to change a tire, or how much to save every month, or whether you should call a cop after a fender bender. Ask them if they’ve ever organized a dance, far less a factory.
Once in the workforce, a lot of folks accept a job without reading the fine print or asking too many questions during the interview and are surprised to learn they don’t like the work. They max out the credit cards, figuring they’ll figure out how to pay that bill next month, and take out loans they’ll never be able to pay back. They get back together with that ex that everyone warned them about, utterly convinced that “this time, he’s changed.”
People choose to believe in crazy rumors, lunatic conspiracy theories, and everything they read on Facebook. They cross the street while staring down at their cell phones, roll the dice on discount plastic surgery and choose to eat Tide Pods. Somebody, somewhere, is taking Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle advice in “Goop” seriously.
At some point, you learn that it’s okay to zig when everyone else is zagging; it may very well be a sign you’re on the right track. I never took out an adjustable-rate mortgage. I discussed my wariness of gambling. My fashion sense is boring when it’s not awful, meaning I’ve taken a pass on all kinds of idiotic trends. Despite the impassioned efforts of my friend and co-host, I still don’t care about the Kardashians.
Can’t control it, don’t care. If somebody else makes a dumb mistake, that’s their responsibility. As the Poles say, “not my circus, not my monkeys.” Focus on your little Burkean platoon, and help out where you can for the people who matter most to you.
Maybe Pyongyang Is Just Too Erratic for Fruitful Negotiations
North Korea’s threatening to pull out of the summit with President Trump in Singapore scheduled for June 12.
If you subscribe to Robert Kelly’s perspective that Trump is too inattentive to details and too hungry for “a win” to negotiate effectively, then maybe this is for the best. In fact, this could end up strengthening the hand of the United States. The president and administration demonstrated not merely a willingness to talk, but an eagerness, and explicitly offered “protections” to the North Korean regime. If Pyongyang walks away from the table anyway — after being the one who invited Trump to the summit! — they will discredit the concept of diplomatic negotiations for a while. And if North Korea refuses to resolve matters through talks, then there’s no other option than ever-tightening sanctions and other forms of international pressure.
For what it’s worth, today the North Korean regime made a big show out of destroying its nuclear testing facilities, showcasing the demolition explosion of tunnels to selected international media . . . but not international arms inspectors.
UPDATE: And . . . never mind, then, as President Trump announced the summit is off in a letter to Kim Jong-un, citing the “tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in [his] most recent statement.” That’s the danger about brinkmanship at the bargaining table with Donald Trump. If you give him an excuse to walk away from the table, he might just use it.
The NFL Will Never Escape the National Anthem Controversy
President Trump gets a win, in the sense that the National Football League is setting policy and threatening to fine teams whose players kneel or otherwise demonstrate during the National Anthem . . . and then Trump has to take it one step farther: “I don’t think people should be staying in the locker rooms, but still I think it’s good. You have to stand proudly for the national anthem. You shouldn’t be playing, you shouldn’t be there. Maybe they shouldn’t be in the country.”
Where, exactly, would he have them go?
I understand all the criticisms of the players and share a lot of the sentiment. Colin Kaepernick, in particular, seems like a uniquely ill-informed soul, denouncing police brutality in the United States while wearing a t-shirt featuring Fidel Castro. The protesting players interpret standing for the anthem as a blanket endorsement of the country as it is, instead of a gesture of respect for a country that, no matter its flaws, we are grateful to live in. They’re introducing divisive controversy into what is usually a unifying moment. They’re multimillionaires who live a life more blessed than 99 percent or so of their fellow citizens, never mind the rest of the world, and appear to be refusing to participate in a moment of appreciation for the country, its freedoms, and the opportunities America provides.
But these guys are taking a knee because they genuinely think it’s the right thing to do, and that it’s the most effective way to call attention to serious problems that they feel would otherwise be ignored. If you want to change their actions, you have to look at it from their perspective and persuade them that they’re harming the cause they want to help. Berating and insulting the players is unlikely to change their behaviors. Threatening them is unlikely to change their behavior either; they risk serious injury every day. They’re jocks, and have marinated in a culture of strength, conflict, and machismo since their early teen years. You think they’re going to back down because they’re getting criticized from the White House or angry calls to sports talk radio?
You have to convince the players that this is alienating people who would otherwise be natural allies. You have to persuade them that the public at large genuinely care about equal treatment under the law and police misconduct.
This is not an alien, faraway experience for young black professional athletes. Yesterday, Milwaukee police released video of police officers confronting Milwaukee Bucks rookie Sterling Brown, who was thrown to the pavement and tased over a parking violation. Half a dozen police cars ended up responding to this incident!
The overwhelming majority of people watching in the stadiums or on televisions at home will never be in a position to influence what a cop does when he pulls over a young black man. But the players need to have faith that those who want to see them stand for the anthem share the values the players do — and that the country we love is indeed committed to ensuring everyone’s rights are respected.
ADDENDA: Give credit to the Washington Capitals hockey team — for once, they didn’t break fans’ hearts! They’re in the Stanley Cup finals, and saved hockey fans from the incongruous matchup of warm, sun-drenched cities Las Vegas and Tampa. Almost every final matchup this century featured at least one cold-weather classic hockey locale: Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York, Jersey, Boston, Philly, Detroit, Ottowa, Edmonton, Calgary . . . Maybe in the coming weeks, Washington will have its first major sports championship since the Redskins won the 1992 Super Bowl.