Grow Up!

Life Isn't Safe, but It's Good

Everett Piper

• Publisher: Regnery
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781684510917
• eBook ISBN: 9781684511174
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Personal Success
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Arrested Development It's not your imagination. Millions of young adults today behave like children. Stuck in a permanent adolescence, they throw temper tantrums when they don't get what they want, blame everyone but themselves for their failures, and refuse to take responsibility for their lives.We used to write off their behavior as a "phase." But that phase doesn't look like it's ending anytime soon. And these grown children are pouring out of the glorified day care known as college and entering the corporate world full of infantile demands and expectations.A former university president, Dr. Everett Piper knows a thing or two about the ideas that motivate today's youth. Having experienced the snowflake mob's rage himself, he understands the threat that these young people pose to the rest of society. Grow Up! is his contrarian blueprint for a successful adult life.With bracing candor, Dr. Piper shares: • How ideologues disguised as teachers arrested the development of entire generations• The dangerous ideas in which popular culture and the education system marinate young people for years• Simple lessons for becoming a thinking, mature citizen• The qualities that made this country great and how to reclaim themFilled with wisdom and learning, Grow Up! is the antidote to the poison that we consume every day—a powerful corrective that shows readers how to live in truth and freedom.

LESSON 1 Walking Is Better Than Crawling

“It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”

—Harry S. Truman

Cry Out Loud

We all come out of our mothers’ wombs with a lot to learn. None of us knew how to walk from the day we were born. We started by crawling on the floor; then we slowly started moving with someone’s help; and, at some point, we fearlessly stepped into the unknown. We took our first steps. Today, though we’ve likely never reflected on that moment, we’re certainly thankful for the fact that we walked.

When we took those first steps, we took our first steps towards becoming fully functioning human beings. We grew and matured, and if we could have shared our toddler moments with our friends on social media at the time, we would have proudly boasted of our accomplishments. If we were able to scroll through all the proverbial posts of #toddlering, we’d notice that regardless of how that first step was shared, it would be considered an improvement, progression, maturation, or a graduation. That step would be recognized as a positive development.

Our friends and family would cheer and celebrate in response. They might LOL—laugh out loud—but in a way that expressed their support. They would be proud to see us on our way to becoming a healthy toddler. Our first step was a milestone in our development, and everyone loves celebrating the accomplishments of people they love.

Our first steps would be followed by many other milestones that we and our family members take the time to celebrate. If we were to put them on social media, we’d share #firstwords, #talkingnow, #realunderwear, #toothfairy, #firstdayofschool, #icanreadnow, #homerun, #prom, #graduation, and many others. We celebrate and recognize these accomplishments as good, part and parcel of flourishing as a human being. We look forward to them and fill baby albums with them. In our culture, we still view these milestones as important and positive. We still value them. But when we reach the goal towards which all previous childhood, teenage, and college milestones were building—adulthood—we suddenly forget how important these milestones are to our continued growth.

You won’t find #toddlering trending on social media, but there are scores of posts tagged #adulting. Maybe you or your kids are even guilty of such posts. Even if you’re not, you have to admit that it’s a cute phrase that makes clever use of irony. #Adulting posts can range from the relatively harmless “Nobody asks me what my favorite dinosaur is anymore” to the more concerning “I’m 27 and my mom still makes my doctor’s appointments, if she didn’t I’d just not go and probably die from something I could’ve completely avoided.” Some tweets celebrate the mundane features of real life in comparison to childhood dreams, while others showcase the complete dysfunction of young adults. The latter kind of statements make many of us recoil because of the irresponsibility and apparent perpetual childishness they represent.

Older generations like to ridicule millennials, or whatever today’s youngest generation is being called, for seeking awards and trophies for showing up. The Participation Trophy generations think they should get medals for performing everyday chores and life functions—things that we all must do. But meanwhile, they hardly perform the basic tasks that are asked of them as adults, and in the rare instances when they do, they demand recognition.

Older folk who grew up in a different time are deeply disturbed by this trend. They see it as a symptom of the general decline that has occurred in our institutions, a symptom of a problem that is consuming current and future generations, plaguing our universities, and will eventually cripple our nation.

It is alarming to many because they have lived long enough to see the value of the trials and travails of a life well-lived. They know from whence they speak. They have navigated these waters and they know where the rocks and the reefs are. They grew up in a time when the phrase “participation trophy” would have seemed oxymoronic. They went to work early in life, moved out of the house young, paid their own way, sacrificed, and, as Nike used to say, “just did it.” These people embraced adulthood; they didn’t hashtag it.

#Adulting isn’t a laugh out loud for the future of America. For the lives of many young adults today and those they’ll impact in the future it should be a cry out loud. It is a mirror in which we can see the misaligned views of our culture.

It’s a Symptom

As a symptom, the reality behind the adulting jokes is malignant, and reveals a stage four societal cancer. This terminal disease isn’t just the fault of the young, but a breakdown in our culture at large. Its genesis is ideological. It stems from political and social ideas that may have appeared right at one point, but which have proven themselves, through trial and error, to be clearly wrong—ideas that may have seemed novel and groundbreaking but which have proven to break little other than the very foundation upon which America, as well as most of the Western world, has been built. Richard Weaver warned of this over seventy years ago, writing “Ideas have consequences” in his book by the same name. His argument was simple. There is no such thing as a neutral idea. Value neutrality is a ruse. Ideas are always directional. Good ideas lead to good culture, good government, good corporations, and good communities. Bad ideas lead to the opposite. For better and for worse, individuals, as well as countries and cultures, are shaped by their ideas. Ideas that are grounded in truth and reality can bring great good. And conversely, ideas that spring from lies and deception always cause great harm. Navigating these ideas and choosing which ones to claim as our own is the quest for adulthood—regardless of our age.

The often-trending “adulting” hashtag and the accompanying mindset provide damning evidence. The situation is dire for the young adults who find adulthood and its attendant responsibilities a laughing and begrudging matter. But the situation isn’t just dire for those youths as individuals; it’s also dire for the nation as a whole. As the younger generations grow into leadership positions, we as a people become more immersed in a culture of perpetual adolescents mired in a banal swamp of ideological despondency.

Beyond the tweets and selfies, real adulting has not yet come to pass for scores of American citizens. The Washington Times recently reported shocking data from the U.S. Census Bureau that illustrates the grim state of affairs: 35 percent of all eighteen- to thirty-four-year-old Americans live with their parents.¹ According to a study recently released by the Pew Research Center, 30 percent of millennial men between the ages of eighteen and thirty-three have no job, 10 percent higher than previous generations. Of that number, approximately 8 percent are unemployed, while 22 percent are not engaged in the workforce at all.² Reports across the country confirm that millennials are marrying less and later than any other generation in history. Four out of ten young adults in 2016 were recorded as being married, while in 1980 it was six out of ten.³

The picture does not look good for a cohort of young adults that boasts of being the most college-educated generation.⁴ We could marshal dozens of studies to confirm what we all see with our own eyes: young Americans aren’t engaging in responsible adult behavior that makes positive contributions to society.

Young adults shirk away from the mundane tasks that form the bedrock of a mature and developed life. They’re moving out of suburban homes that need cleaning, maintenance, and love into cramped city condominiums where everything is taken care of for them. Instead of taking the time to prepare dinner and carry out household chores, they’re ordering takeout and spending money on needless services. Millennials are so averse to domestic normalcy that many no longer use the top sheet on their bed.⁵ Apparently they no longer see the obvious purpose and function of very simple things like sheets and bedding!

Without the supervision of their parents, millennials and the generations that follow them are prolonging their teenage years. They’ve clenched their fists and dug in their heels as they’ve been pushed to adulthood, resisting with every ounce of their being. While they’ve resisted the natural progression of life, choosing instead to arrest their own development, they’ve forced their absurd childish demands on the rest of society. The snowflake rebellion and the need for endless coddling are now playing out in every corner of American life. They don’t just want to stew in their extended adolescence; they want to remake American government in their image. They advocate for an overbearing government with policies that bring more dependency, less personal responsibility, and, one could argue, more prolonged adolescence and immaturity.

But lest you think I am just blaming millennials and GenZers, let me be clear: blame also lies with their parents. Many of the ideas the boomers institutionalized and the personal decisions they made have set the stage for this dysfunction. Boomer parenting was the equivalent of surgically removing a student’s frontal lobe before demanding that he explain an algebraic formula, or removing a girl’s legs while asking her to run a race. The prolonged adolescence, social dysfunction, and psychological fragility of the millennials is the legacy of the baby boomers. The boomers have left their progeny these qualities as an inheritance. To put it in different terms, we boomers have given our kids a culture and a country where, as C.S. Lewis warned, we have “gelded the stallion and bid him be fruitful.” We have removed our nation’s character and expect its citizens to show courage. My generation has “created men without chests” and demands virtue of them.

This lunacy of creating a culture of perpetual dependency is what led to my first book, Not a Day Care. It’s also what brings many in the younger generations to “feel the Bern” and fall in line with the likes of Bernie Sanders, AOC, and those who preach that socialism will cure all that ails us.

The differences between the snowflake generations and their predecessors are clear for all to see. The snowflakes whine and moan and turn to false prophets on the political left; the “Greatest Generation,” that memorable group of Americans who built this country into a global superpower through hard work and sacrifice, gave everything they could to their country without expecting anything in return. No great civilization has ever made growing up and becoming an adult a joke or a hashtag. No successful culture has ever bemoaned adulthood as something to lament. And most importantly, no civilization has stretched out the start of adulthood as long as America is doing now and survived. We are in uncharted waters that will have ramifications for us all.

The English language has borrowed quite a few idiomatic phrases from watching ducks with their offspring. We’ve all seen the charming scene of a mother duck waddling to her destination with a long line of her babies in tow. Sometimes, when the mother manages to keep her babies in an orderly formation, we see that she has her “ducks in a row.” But often, one of the baby ducklings will break formation—one duckling will be an “odd duck.” An orderly line of ducklings makes it easy to tell which one might be eccentric. The orderly line makes it easier to mark the odd duck.

If we were to stretch young American adults from every generation out in a line, the twenty-something-year-old of the present would stand out as the odd duck. We would immediately recognize him, irrespective of the clothes or gadgets he had. Modern dress, haircuts, and Apple Watches would hardly be needed to distinguish our American youth from the American youth of times past. You see, the youths of earlier generations relished the idea and role of becoming adults.

The same would hold true if we lined up youths from great civilizations in the past. Again, our contemporary young friends would be a proverbial orange among apples. Just as the American youths of earlier days were eager for adulthood and its attendant responsibilities, so too were the young men and women of Rome, Egypt, and Mesopotamia. No matter what time or where you went around the world to find young adults, you would find that they viewed adulthood as superior to childhood. Only our young adults seem to disagree.

Throughout known history, growing up, progressing, and becoming a mature man or woman has been eagerly anticipated. Childhood and teenage years were meant to prepare young men and women for their years of maturity. And during those preparatory years there was a yearning to be a free, responsible, and mature human being—otherwise known as an adult. There were childhood dreams and teenage desires: move out of the house, get a job, make a living, build a career, accept responsibility, and make a contribution to one’s society. No one aspired to barely provide for himself and pine after childhood, doing the equivalent of sitting in his apartment and eating Ramen noodles while binging on Netflix and Pokémon.

Sure, the economic depressions through which we’ve lived don’t help. And as we’ve mentioned, the failed parenting techniques and cultural aspirations of the baby boomers certainly bear some responsibility. But I would argue that the contemporary mindset of perpetual adolescence is the product of bad education. The philosophical foolishness of the academy has trickled down, shaping and molding our world one graduating class at a time. These college graduates, educated to take leadership roles in society, think that it should be cared for while not having a clue about the priorities of mature life. They have been taught to think of the world in childish and imbecile ways; it should be no surprise that they leave their respective campuses as childish imbeciles.

How can we get out of this vicious cycle of dependency and selfish focus? How can we quit being the odd duck and fall in line? While it’s a Herculean task, we must find a way to learn from our predecessors and retrieve the common sense of past generations.

We Must Learn

Every society has a set of norms and expectations—you could call them rules or guidelines for the individuals that make up the community. Those norms and expectations are meant to teach people how to act. Being a functioning adult in a given place means adhering to those rules. The rules, which may be flawed, are general teachers of what it means to be a part of the group.

For a boy to become a man, or for a girl to become a woman, they had to grow in the ways prescribed to them. That growth took place through education, whether that meant the formal book learning of the schools or the informal education of experience. In fact, it could be argued the entire point of education is to learn and grow. Education turns unformed youths and adolescents into useful, productive members of society. Through education, a society teaches people to function, work, and keep useful knowledge alive by passing it down to following generations. That’s why every society invests so many resources into teaching. From the point of view of the individual, learning how to act in society is the reason for learning. It’s the reason schools were created in the first place. It’s the reason for the ivory tower. Every college and university had a specific reason for its founding. This was called its mission! Whether it was Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Dartmouth, Princeton, or Yale, each school had a mission statement that made it quite clear why it was necessary and why it existed. Quite simply, every one of them was established to teach students how to think and act like intelligent, thoughtful, moral, and mature human beings.

We can go beyond formal education and consider learning itself. From the time we are a baby we begin learning. Every time we utilize our senses, we learn and grow and increase in our function. When we know more, we can do more. As infants learning about the world, we lay the building blocks that will act as the foundation for adulthood and the rest of our lives. We’re setting the rungs of a ladder we’ll climb into adulthood.

Education is always oriented toward certain milestones. Whether mastering a subject, learning concrete skills, or apprenticing in a trade, we’re always moving toward a particular accomplishment that will be of general use to our community. Whether that’s individual, like the example of learning to walk we discussed earlier, or some form of social recognition, like receiving a license or degree, we’re always pushing forward toward an ability that we can share with our peers.

Historically, and in many cultures, there are rites of passage that form the centerpiece of one’s life. These moments celebrate the move from adolescence to adulthood, or toward adulthood. Today, we’re most familiar with the bar and bat mitzvahs of the Jews. The former celebrates a boy’s transition to manhood, while the latter celebrates a girl’s ascension to womanhood. But Jewish culture is certainly not the only one to express rites of passage. In Hispanic culture, people celebrate the quinceañera. Even the Amish Rumspringa is familiar in pop culture today.

Dozens of cultures celebrate rites of passage, and some of those rites are better known to the broader public than others. In cultures that have clear rites of passage, the transition into adulthood is viewed and respected and honored. While our American rites of passage may not be as symbolic, we certainly have unofficial milestones that serve a similar function. Arbitrary events like graduation, getting a first real job, turning a particular age, marriage, and having a child all act in a similar way to what other cultures express in ritual practice. Some argue, with some merit, that the lack of clearly defined rites of passage has caused confusion among our ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Introduction: A Time Such as This
• Lesson 1: Walking Is Better Than Crawling
• Lesson 2: Plates Don’t Have Legs
• Lesson 3: Don’t Fall in the Pool
• Lesson 4: Pack Jumper Cables
• Lesson 5: Don’t Argue with the Mechanic
• Lesson 6: You’re Not Webster
• Lesson 7: Love Lost
• Lesson 8: Brush Your Teeth before Leaving
• Lesson 9: Jell-O Doesn’t Nail to the Wall
• Lesson 10: Bring Your Umbrella
• Lesson 11: Be What the Box Says
• Lesson 12: Listen for Omaha
• Lesson 13: Be the All-Beef Patty
• Lesson 14: Wish Everyone a Merry Christmas
• Lesson 15: Stay in the Pen
• Lesson 16: Wear the White Hat
• Lesson 17: Look at an Aerial Photo
• Lesson 18: Was It Helpful or Hurtful?
• Lesson 19: There Is No “I” in Team
• Lesson 20: Sit at the Exit Door
• Conclusion
• About the Author
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright