The whole time they're at college, the majority are still protected, cocooned among their peers in a rigidly-controlled, "thou shalt not cause offense", milieu, enforced by older, just as immature "professionals".
On top of that, I feel quite certain they've been praised, in ways seen and unseen, to toe the party line as taught by union hacks. (That is not to say all teachers are union hacks, but you know the ones who are [and Randi Weingarten is one that immediately springs to mind]). Honestly, I can't imagine going to school today facing the magnitude of the indoctrination and come out halfway normal. Standing up to the whole
global warming climate change nonsense must be tough, a conceptual scam which should be relegated to a course on The History of Fraudulent Science, for both history
and science majors. Sort of like
The Donation of Constantine. It was so real . . . , until it wasn't.
My freshman year in college was the tail end of Vietnam, and we had two vets (Army and Air Force) (the Army guy had bdeen in 'Nam) on my floor, then two below was another Air Force guy who had been in 'Nam. All on the GI Bill and all with a definite opinion of the military, little of it good. One guy, an AF AP, put up with a lot of chickensh*t while on duty in England. One of his fellow AP's committed suicide on post one night with a .45 and was quite messy as described by my dormmate who found his friend. Quite naturally, I gave these guys leeway in their opinions because they were based upon personal experience. They did not hate America. They hated the Vietnam War.
And quite honestly, so did I, but not for anti-war reasons. I was against the war because I somehow realized at the ripe old age of 11-12 that something was f*cked up over there. I remember the weekly body counts on the national news at dinnertime. It was always something like 'this week, 254 US soldiers lost their lives while 10,500 enemy were killed'. Even in my tiny and unformed mind, the math didn't add up. I knew that if we were killing that many and losing only those few, then we should be rolling, albeit bloodily, along; Grant is a good example of success while employed in a war of attrition (at least in this one, Americans were not on both sides, except for Kerry and such ilk). As I grew older, I learned about the idea that Vietnam was a 9 to 5 war, that Charlie owned the night. Today, that wouldn't be the case as our military has gone big-time for small fire teams of extremely qualified men (no women in the super elite units that I know of). We own the night. Stealth technology has seen to that. No longer could a jungle canopy provide cover for a Ho Chi Minh trail.
I was always pro-war, if you will. I understood the necessity, at times, of shedding blood to do the right thing. WWII was still fresh in grade school; my parents being of that generation didn't hurt none, either. I read/looked at an article in Life (or the other mag) concerning death camps with, that I specifically remember, photos of Jewesses lining up naked in Treblinka for that final gauntlet into the showers. One couldn't stop the Nazis without using massive and lethal force. Communism was just as bad, but somehow stayed localized in its conflict of ideologies. So I understood the Holocaust, even though I didn't learn that formal name until much later (I think it might have been that tv miniseries from the late '70's, with Michael Moriarity called, appropriately,
The Holocaust; much later I learned the name
Shoah). So I was not against the Vietnam War on some sort of peacenik principles but rather because we weren't fighting to win. How many sitting Congresspersons at the time who were critical of the War had ever had one iota of military training, even if just military history? And yet they knew better than generals often learned on the taxpayer dime. Congress didn't throw good money after bad but rather ignored those whom they (collectively and as a part of Government) had educated at taxpayer cost to provide just such advice. The one thing Gulf War I retaught sentient Americans is that if we are going to go to war, build it up, take the enemy out with overwhelming force, then think about rebuilding; Operation Iraqi Freedom had a different mindset from the outset.
I'm not saying the US is perfect, but this Country has been a force for good more than a force for evil. We have freed god knows how many. We have, until now, passed along the legacy of those who wrote of secular Government and wrote its rules and procedures in a document called the Constitution. Some of our former enemies are our greatest success stories in the real 'regime change' department: Germany and Japan. I had hoped that maybe Iraq could at least be a nominal friend in the region, but I think that is not going to happen. (I was extremely disappointed by the Iraqis who were given their freedom on a silver platter after decades of living under the tyrannical rule of the al-Tikriti clan.) I had never held much hope for Afghanistan, and I thought early on and I still think today that we did not destroy enough, kill enough to make a long term difference. Those who live there see who will last, who the strong horse will be, and those strong horses have shari'a as their guide. Can't blame 'em, but we tried. Yet with Iraq I had hoped for a little more gratitude, yes gratitude. We were never fighting the Iraqi people, took great pains at enormous cost to spare them and they're like, 'Eh, what have you done for me lately?'