The Kids Are All Right was a 2010 movie that attempted to reassure audiences that the teenage children of a lesbian couple are psychologically just fine. The movie is largely forgotten but the title has lingered, often as a springboard for observers who say that today’s kids are not, in fact, all right.
The diagnoses of what ails the current generation of young folk are many and various. They are the products of infantilization, feminization, iPhones, cancel culture, digitalization, narcissism, social-justice intoxication and nihilism – among other maladies. They suffer from the breakdown of the nuclear family, the absence of fathers, the leftist capture of the schools, the dark temptations of fascism, their ignorance of the nightmares of communism – and they suffer from the rise of AI.
You carry the same burdens but you have somehow found the way to get on with the task
They don’t date, they’re porn-addicted, they imagine they can change their sex and they support Hamas. They dislike Christianity and organized religion in general, but they are drawn to substitutes that they fail to see are parasites on the old creeds. Alternatively, they gravitate to Nick Fuentes. They are scarred by Covid, brainwashed by the 1619 Project and half-convinced that the climate apocalypse is real.
That’s a lot of weight to carry for teenagers and young adults. And it is hardly fair: they can’t be all of those things at once. But, collectively, they are all these things, and hats off to the cultural critics who have patiently laid out the details of each diagnosis. (I apologize if I have missed any.)
Naturally, Gen Z has its defenders, who mostly shrug off the litany of laments. Plainly, the depiction of a whole generation lost in these swamps is a caricature. The counterview can be called “The Kids Are Still All Right,” despite many attempts to dismantle the moral and social norms of civilization and replace them with an embrace of an ideal hedonistic self-indulgence. And Generation Alpha (born in 2010 or later) will swim with ease through our brave new whirlpool. This is because every generation is castigated by those who came before, and they nonetheless find their own way.
Phooey. Gen Z is a mess and Gen Alpha faces grim prospects. Let me establish my bona fides for this. My parents, born in the 19-teens, were “greatest generation” types. They survived the 1918 flu pandemic (though not all members of their families did), endured hard times in the Great Depression and World War Two (in which my father served), married late and lived a lot more frugally than they had to. They shunned debt. They saved scrupulously. Their two sons didn’t live up to these ideals, but we recognized them as guideposts.
I was born near the middle of the baby boom cohort – actually during an air raid alert, which the government practiced regularly during those years, though no enemy bombers ever appeared over Pittsburgh.
We grew up with the bomb. Our teachers were almost all really smart women who had few options other than teaching (and nursing) if they wished to pursue careers. Our classrooms were overcrowded because that “boom” was real. We had rock ’n’ roll, Eisenhower, the Kennedy assassination, the Vietnam War, the draft, race riots, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination, “the 1960s,” the sexual revolution, the mainstreaming of drugs, more riots, the Weather Underground, Star Trek, and everything on television. This is all still vivid to me and to the great majority of my baby boom peers who could not have missed it if they wanted to – and cannot forget it, either.
Both my parents’ experiences and my own provide the vantage point by which I look on current trends. Like every generation, we are stuck with our slice of history. I come from a line of late-procreating fathers. My paternal grandfather was born in 1864, during the Civil War, which perhaps strengthens my rootedness in the United States. That rootedness is not a privilege everyone enjoys, but it doesn’t make me “privileged” in the contemporary sense of being among the “oppressors” holding sway over the “oppressed.” I come from a long line of rural farmers, blacksmiths, ordinary sailors and the like, who got by in the US but never prospered. My father eventually achieved middle-class standing as an attorney. He went to work in a suit, but still spoke in the country accent of his youth.
So I write not from a lofty height, but am elevated enough to feel dismay at a generation (or two) who are angry at their cultural inheritance and ready to endorse political nostrums that would discredit their past and compromise their own future. The litany of diagnoses I have cited cover the spectrum of excuses that psychologists and other social analysts have proposed for the peculiar vulnerabilities of this age cohort.
I confess that I’ve offered my own explanation (A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now) and I am rather fond of it, but I’m not auditioning here for a part in the eventual movie. Rather, I’d like to offer big-ups, or whatever the zoomers call it, to the substantial segment of this generation who are finding their way through the cyber-wilderness of their peers. They carry the same burdens, but have somehow found the way to shrug off the self-pity and get on with the task. My father and my grandfather would recognize them as kindred spirits. Me too.
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