Posted on 12/27/2005 4:51:43 PM PST by qam1
If, as President Bush said last year, it is to be “liberty’s century,” the members of the Fourteenth Generation are the appointed guardians.
The first chapter of Matthew’s Gospel opens the New Testament with a genealogy. It is a Christmas list -- not a wish list, but a Providential list. It is the outworking of God’s Hand in the generations through history, culminating in the birth of Christ.
Matthew 1:17 summarizes the genealogy. “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; and from David until the carrying away into Babylon are fourteen generations; and from the carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are fourteen generations.” Fourteen is a Providential number.
Today, two thousand years after the incarnation, we are no less a part of God’s great story than the Old Testament prophets and kings, or the New Testament disciples. What wonders might God have in store for America at the brink of 2006? Is there a Fourteenth Generation somewhere in the nation’s wings, ready to act upon some great plan of destiny?
Thirteen, of course, is known to the superstitious as the unlucky number. Generational scholars Neil Howe and William Strauss labeled the apathetic, bewildered, ambiguous Generation X the Thirteenth Generation for its strange place in history (born in the late 1960s and 1970s). “Counting back to the peers of Benjamin Franklin,” they wrote, “this generation is, in point of fact, the thirteenth to know the American nation, flag, and constitution.” After the Thirteenth Generation, Howe and Strauss called the new youth the Millennial Generation, but we might just as well be called the Fourteenth Generation.
Fourteen generations ago was the age of the men and women who first called themselves Americans. It was the elder generation of the Founding Fathers, the contemporaries of the Great Awakening: Jonathan Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Samuel Adams. About fourteen generations before them lived Christopher Columbus.
The early Americans, from the Puritans to the Founders, considered themselves the objects of God’s special favor and the tools of His service in this land. “We know the Race is not to the swift nor the Battle to the Strong,” John Page wrote to Thomas Jefferson on July 20, 1776. “Do you not think an Angel rides in the Whirlwind and directs this Storm?” To the American founders, the “Supreme Ruler of the Universe” and “Divine Providence” directed that storm. Patrick Henry wrote to Henry Lee in 1795, “The American Revolution was the grand operation, which seemed to be assigned by the Deity to the men of this age in our country.” Dare we presume this generation not called to some task of equal measure in the course of human events, a task that will demand the same brand of highly cultivated courage and faith that attended the American founding?
We have little reason to think ourselves exempt from God’s plan, tempting though the alternatives seem. The world promises a whole lot of stuff to those who make the world’s investment. But it isn’t for the sake of our prosperity and physical satisfaction that God orders the world; that He does for some higher reason that confounds even the most expert observers of hurricanes and earthquakes and of the rise and fall of nations. We are here, in our generation, in our little moment of time, to serve the King of Kings. Our task is to be conformed to His plan, not He to ours.
America is unique in the world. We can view that uniqueness as a product of ourselves alone, or of something higher, something that in turn gives us meaning. To choose the second vantage would mean revival to a dying civilization. Such a revolution of intellect, morality, culture, and spirit would be the reversal of the prior revolution that even now attributes its aging breaths to retiring Baby Boomers on college campuses, in the old media, in liberal churches, in public high schools. Slow fades the flicker on the marijuana joint; fast rises the Light of the World.
The emergence of a generation, like the incarnation, is a reminder that history is going somewhere.
The vanguard of the Fourteenth Generation is now graduating from high school, in college, entering the work world, and defending America in the Middle East. We were born and raised in prosperity. We are the chief recipients of the financial consumption that I witnessed in the parking lots and checkout lines of my local mall two days before Christmas. We are not protestors or slobs like the Baby Boomers. We are not slackers or radical individualists like the Xers. The leading edge of the generation is proving itself to value community institutions, personal connections, religious tradition, respectful tolerance, self-government, and spiritual purpose.
In the Fourteenth Generation, drug use is down; teen pregnancy and teen abortions are down; optimism is up; support of traditional moral values is up; “reality” is the big word because interest in absolute truth is up. A higher percentage of young people are pro-life than of any other age group. It is a generation of whom liberalism was expected and conservatism is being returned. We are patriotic and ambitious like our grandparents, morally rebellious like our parents. We are now in the beginning stages of that rebellion, and it is a rebellion against rebellion.
If, as President Bush said last year, it is to be “liberty’s century,” the members of the Fourteenth Generation are the appointed guardians.
Hans Zeiger is a junior at Hillsdale College and author of Get Off My Honor: The Assault on the Boy Scouts of America, as well as a forthcoming book about the rise of conservatism amongst young Americans. www.hanszeiger.net
Ping list for the discussion of the politics and social (and sometimes nostalgic) aspects that directly effects Generation Reagan / Generation-X (Those born from 1965-1981) including all the spending previous generations (i.e. The Baby Boomers) are doing that Gen-X and Y will end up paying for.
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I don't know about you, but the tattoo'd, mulitlingual, goatee-wearing, Bratz-doll-like, oral sex on the playground 14th generation scares the bejeebies out of me.
:)
Not ya' started it....here they come...
His conclusion puts the lie to his earlier assertion that Gen X was 'bewildered' and 'apathetic' about everything. Gen X might be financially less well off, more aborted, and poorly educated compared to their predecessors, but unlike the Boomers, They do know how to raise kids. And the non-Gen-X parents are mostly Boomers who are smart and waited to have kids until stable enough to do so, or Boomers who have grasped that they f'ed up the first time around with their initial families and have gotten better with their second parenting--though often abandoning their first spouse and kids in so doing. Gen X tends to really consider the financial and overall family impact of kids, and get it right the first time by parenting instead of resume-building.
I don't know any Boomer like that. Including me.
Didn't know I was wandering into a Boomer-bashing thread. [Or, aren't they all!]
Your generation is full of self-absorption and self-adulation among other things. If it's just now graduating from high school, it is NOT for the most part defending America in Iraq. The soldiers LEADING that charge cut their teeth in Mogadishu, GW I, and some places we'll never hear much about. I should mention that your generation also seems very quick to take credit for things they did not do. That's going to make you very unpopular one day.
Us Baby Boomer "protesters" and "slobs" built an economy for your sorry ***es to enter at the lowest level until you've EARNED respect and a higher position through merit. That is if you can compete against people as good or better than you in India, Singapore, and Communist China. And if you can't, us slobs and protesters will nix your domestic job and ship it overseas faster than you can say quarterly results.
Son, it's always been a "rebellion against a rebellion. Most of the world is one big cycle, and it's been around long enough to teach you and yours some lessons. Did you know that the Greeks fought the Persians up the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq along lines of battle that our troops now fight along? It's that old.
God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason.
Hans Zeiger ought to be reminded that: a) pride goeth before fall; b) that Hillsdale College probably has reading lists of books to read and paper assignments to write, and c) it is not right to inflict his output on unsuspecting audience. His professors are at least paid to read it.
I'll take ome Hillsdale grad to any 10 from the Ivy.
"I don't know any Boomer like that. Including me. Didn't know I was wandering into a Boomer-bashing thread. [Or, aren't they all!]"
Oh, I'm sure. In fact, I bet you and your Boomer friends are all great parents. Please, please, spout your kids' resume to prove me wrong.
I do not have children. How sensitive of you.
Anyone who paints folks with a broad brush (especially because of the year in which they happened to be born) makes a mistake.
There are good boomer parents and bad boomer parents. Frankly, most of the parents I see out and about today seem to be letting their kiddies run the show. That's not what I consider good parenting, but your mileage may vary.
susie
Bought six copies of the Fourth Turning by Strauss and Howe and sent them as Christmas gifts to friends. It is a great book. Change is coming.
Like I give a rat's ass about being "sensitive" to you. If you want to be PC, go play on DU.
Please do not give me that tired 'you can't paint with a broad brush' schtick here. Of course there are exceptions. But we make fun of DU every day, and I don't see a lot of people saying we shouldn't paint them with a broad brush. Saying 'boomer parenting' is speaking generally, not specifically. I'm sure some of your best friends are boomers and they rock, and I know some Gen Xers suck as parents.
But as to the notion that most parents are letting their kiddies run the show, I think it depends on where you go, too. Don't forget that the parents you see right now, as the last of Gen X and the start of the Millenials, are likely to be indicative of how Millenials will parent (think Silent Generation--then think, "Oh, crap!"). But I think there is no question that divorced parenting is not as good as married parenting, that permissive parenting is not as good as REAL parenting, that being a friend to your child is not being a parent, and all these negative practices are much more prevalent in the Boomer parents whence they came from than the Gen X parents who lived through that sort of parenting.
I thought it was an interesting article, and how it went from where it was to parenting or boomer defense mode...hell, who knows. If I had to pick between those who choose to be big people who defend Boomers or one of the 14th generation that IS defending this country, guess which one I'd pick. The PC crap just REALLY got me, when the RUDEometer was bleeping away. LOL!
Let's hope it's a good change. The young are often dangerously led. One can only hope the right visionary leads them.
This dude has some serious issues. Engaging in numerology for one thing while claiming to be Christian.
I think it will be. Folks are fed up with too much government interference in their lives. It has gotten to the point that we simply can't afford the current system any longer.
Well no generation has the corner on RUDEness. Obviously.
Guess some are more RUDE than others.
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