ok, I see all your points, being of advanced years, I understand the concept of waiting and observing, but I must say I feel apprehensive for my children and grandchildren. I know they have not been given the strength of insight that we of older years were fortunate to get from viable schools.
I have been more successful with my first born in inculcating in him my feelings about this nation, but my first grandchild is entering junior high school and is already apathetic at best and mis-informed at worst about her culture and nation unless her father re-educates her when he finds errors that have been funneled into her head by the local school system
I am a bit younger - 50 - and I have similar concerns about my children and one grandchild.
My oldest daughter is married, she and her husband both staunch conservatives, Christians, and at the very least in tune with conservative media. Not 100% sure how that translates to ideology or action, but they're on the right side of the fence. But my grandson is only 5. I worry for him, just because there is so long to go before he reaches adulthood. I would not see him robbed of childhood by the Left stealing his opportunity to live in America as it was intended to be.
My older son, frankly, I worry. He is very bright. Brilliantly so, I would say. Which made him a favorite of his teachers all through high school. He's off to college now, at the uber-liberal University of Minnesota, and I fear for him. He's a good guy, a smart guy, and seems to "get" things. But he's also demonstrated some more liberal tendencies in regard to homosexual marriage, multi-culturalism, illegal immigration, etc. All these things are rooted in his youthful desire to be kind and accepting.
I have tried to warn him that professors will attempt to conflate his more liberal opinions on these social issues with Leftist thinking - use his open-mindedness as a platform to challenge all his beliefs - and fill the void with Marxist equivalence, ie; if mom and dad are wrong about gay marriage, and people who approve of gay marriage are progressives, then you are aligned with progressives, thus mom and dad are wrong about capitalism. He seems aware of this tactic, and receptive to my warnings. I am hopeful, but with him, I wait to see...
My younger son, I have little concern. He's more of a black-and-white kid. He's a senior in high school, and I think he's got pretty clear cut opinions about right and wrong, and the evil of collectivism.
Then there's my 8 year old daughter, adopted from China. We received her in 2005, when she was 11 months old. When we made the decision to adopt, I never would have imagined that we were bringing her to a place where there would be a debate over whether or not to become like the place we took her from. I fear for her most of all - that America will let her down. A part of me even fears that given the right set of circumstances, America will end up worse than China. I shudder at the thought that we rescued her from what was surely a life in hell as an abandoned orphan released onto the streets upon reaching age 12 - into a family who intended to provide her with all the opportunity and abundance of the United States of America - only to see America fall to the same evil ideology that plagues the country from which we rescued her.
Alas. It's one of those days.
