Marybeth Hicks - Dont Let the Kids Drink the Kool-Aid: Confronting the Assault on Our Families, Faith, and Freedom

I n 2007, while still a member of the United States Senate, Barack Obama said, I am absolutely convinced that culture wars are just so 90s. Their days are growing dark. Obama was right. The culture wars are over. We lost.

We are no longer fighting to uphold traditional social values. Now were fighting a battle over the very definition of what it means to be an American, and what America means to the world. A losing battle.

A decade ago there was talk among conservatives of a strategic retreat. Americans of traditional values should absent themselves from the public square (territory the other side already controlled, anyway), hunker down at home or in private and parochial schools, and raise a new generation of Americans who would grow up to undo the damage the Left was wreaking on all our institutions.

Well, we managed the retreat bit, all right. Its the strategic part that we failed to pull off. Its easy to see the signs that conservatives, religious people, and patriotic Americans are absent from our entertainment, news media, and public school management.

But is the new generation of American teens and twenty-somethings ready to come raring back and reclaim our public institutions for traditional American values?

In a word, No.

We retreated from the public square. But somehow the Leftism that went unchallenged there managed to follow our children. Home, to their bedrooms, where 70 percent of American kids have their own TV. Onto their computers and cell phones; they spend more than seven hours a day interacting with electronic media. And to their friendly neighborhood public schools, where the dedicated teachers Americans trust with their childrens educations are implementing lesson plans designed to make converts for socialism and radical environmentalism.

Thats an old storythe long march of radical Leftists through our institutions.

The new news is worse. Its not just that Leftists are attempting to instill their radical beliefs in the minds and hearts of children.

Its that our children have swallowed these lessons hook, line, and sinker. Polls prove that on issue after issue, American young people are buying what the Left is selling.

They dont understand the value of the free market. They expect and welcome government interference in the most intimate aspects of their lives. Theyre sure SUVs are destroying the planet. Theyre sold on the Lefts redefinition of family, and when they reach young adulthood theyre failing to form families of their own. Theyre dropping out of churches in record numbers. They believe Christians are mean and judgmental.

Weve been deluding ourselves that in the long run we could win a war of attrition.

After all, we think, conservatives and religious people can actually be bothered to raise children. Homeschoolers, churchgoing Christians, and orthodox Jews still have big families. Liberal atheists stay childless to save the planet (or perhaps because they dont want to grow up themselves).

But the Leftists dont have to have children. They can steal ours.

And to win they dont have to turn our children into angry revolutionaries. They just have to do exactly what theyre doingshape our kids into a generation completely ignorant of the principles that have made America the extraordinary nation it is, and fill them with so much worry over so-called crises (from global warming to the childhood obesity epidemic) that theyll naturally let the government step in and take care of us all. That will be quite sufficient to end the American experiment with republican self-governmentin one generation.

Considering our nations origins, its obvious why the Left is intent on feeding our kids a steady diet of propaganda. If the path to maintain our republican form of government is to rear citizens who will protect it, then the surest means to devolve into a socialist state is to raise a generation of Americans who will naturally accept such a political system.

They dont do it by promoting a desire for a workers paradise in our budding young citizens. (Exception: Wisconsin!) Instead, the Lefts goal is to inculcate our children with the beliefs, attitudes, and opinions that will predispose them to a socialist America.

In pursuit of their liberal utopia, they are toppling the three-legged stool on which our nation rests: religion, the traditional family, and free market capitalism.

The Left promotes an alternative core belief systemsecular progressive collectivismwith all its attendant moral relativism and political correctness.

To truly breed our nations children into the first generation of American socialists, the Left knows it must manage young Americas expectations, creating attitudes of dependence and entitlement. The ultimate manifestation of the socialist worldview is our young peoples desire for security over liberty.

Every family in our nation stands at the intersection between politics and parenting, facing a crisis in which the fate of our nation will be decided. But you dont have to be a parent to be concerned. In fact, the result of this campaign to indoctrinate our nations youth will affect every one of us, regardless of our family status. The reason is simple: our Founders created a nation whose very existence depends upon the virtuous exercise of civic participation by a people who are informed about and committed to the constitutional republic they conceived.

In short, we cant maintain the kind of system our Founders built for us without the kind of people who built it.