It is distressing to watch the young adults of Antifa as they break windows, burn cars, and wreak havoc in the liberal cities that tolerate their riots. One observer wrote that Antifa has gathered to it a motley crew of college-educated young adults who have been indoctrinated in their expensive universities and graduated with no marketable skills. They are filled with resentment because they are also filled with a sense of entitlement. They worked hard in school and now, they are unable to obtain for themselves the luxuries they believe they deserve.
This “Hey, Boomer” generation resents its parents and grandparents, who have worked all their lives to obtain those luxuries. It didn’t work its way through college. It didn’t get called upon to go to war. It didn’t face an unpopular draft. It wasn’t challenged. Instead, it went to college on borrowed money, traveled to Cancun on spring break (on borrowed money), and now, having useless degrees in “Women’s Studies,” or “Social Work” they find themselves unable to find decent-paying jobs. Even while the Trump economy was roaring, these young people sponged off their parents. Many of them still live at home well into their twenties. They haven’t even started their own lives as an independent, productive adult.
I have a theory. Life demands something of each of us. It’s part of the conditions of mortality. Life requires us to work, no matter who you are. If you were a Sumerian farmer thousands of years ago, you had to work to survive. You had to work every day to weed your crop, water it, and nourish it. If you were an Olmec stonecarver, you had to move giant blocks of stone to the site where it was wanted and you had to spend hours in difficult, backbreaking labor to produce your work. If you were a European musician under the patronage of some nobleman, you had to produce work for your patron—work that required skill, discipline, hours of concentration, rehearsal, rewriting and preparation. A carpenter, or a welder, or a truck driver today commits to learning a trade and spends hours daily practicing it. Life demands it. There is no ease unless one is born to wealth. In those cases, the elites are actually out-of-touch with life’s demands. The “Let them eat cake” set are never fully involved in life itself. They are consumed by an illusion.
Today’s young people have not had to work to survive. Someone else has always picked up the slack for them. Parents, teachers, professors and others cut them slack. They got trophies for showing up, not for excellence. They played soccer and T-ball games where no one kept score. The problem is that life keeps score. The aforementioned Sumerian farmer had to fight with nature to bring forth his crops. He had to fight off plagues of locusts or droughts. The scope of these things were beyond his ability to control, therefore he turned to the Divine to intervene in his behalf. The need to survive often leads us to turn to God for problems that seem overwhelming. This generation has had this instinct educated out of them. They won’t turn to God. They don’t believe. They turn bitter and resentful because they are frustrated in their goals, but they won’t follow a benevolent, still, small voice that would guide them.
The problem is that the still, small voice draws us toward life and its trials. It doesn’t exempt us from the need to struggle to survive. It’s part of the plan. The “everybody-gets-a-pony” generation refuses to accept that paradigm. They believe they deserve everything without working for it. They are about to get a crucial life lesson.
The recent Antifa attempt to set up an autonomous collective state in Seattle illustrates this situation. Within the first 24 hours of its existence, the food that had been provided to it (not produced by it) was eaten up by homeless people. The Antifans put up a sign requesting donations of vegan food and soy milk, clean clothes, and a few other essentials. They expect the world to provide for them. They planted a “community garden” which amounted to several bags of topsoil dumped onto a grassy spot in a park and strewn with some seeds and a few plants. Nobody turned or prepared the soil. Nobody tends to the watering or the weeding that will be necessary. It’s illusory.
Everything in life that succeeds requires more work than what you think it should. Entropy is real. I call it the “twenty percent rule.” If you own anything, let’s say its a car or a house, you have to pay for it and maintain it. Nature is always taking things towards their ultimate deterioration. If you have a house, you have to periodically paint it, put a new roof on it, replace the air conditioning system or the hot water heater. If you don’t, those things eventually deteriorate and break, causing other problems. If you have a car, it requires oil changes, new tires, brakes, etc. In addition to the cost of the car or house, you’ll probably spend another twenty percent in routine maintenance every year. Even when the item s paid-for, you have to put in the maintenance. Likewise, out of your salary, you will have to spend twenty percent to maintain the stuff you own. That means you need to save at least twenty percent over time to just keep ahead of entropy. If you want to get ahead of it, you need to save an additional ten percent, at least.
Society is rapidly decaying. Entropy is at work. The social structure that has protected and spoiled this younger generation is collapsing. It will not be able to provide for them. Their survival will depend on their labors. Pandemics, economic disruptions, wars, plagues, famines refocus humanity forces us to refocus on survival. Those things are coming. In history, we see periods of famine, natural disasters, and war that remind people of the need to reach out to God to ensure our continued survival. When the prospect of personal death or suffering becomes real, we can find ourselves in the need of God. That brings us face-to-face with the need to repent. It’s the ultimate reality check. All our illusions dissipate in the face of starvation or war. Sometimes God has to remind us of the reality of the universe and the principle of entropy. I think we are about to see a big correction take place.
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