BY RUSSELL TURNER
THE NEXT GENERATION
As we get older I guess it is only natural for all of us to be concerned about what our country will be like when we are no longer here. I can vividly remember hearing my grandfather talk about his concerns about the upcoming generations; while my grandfather was not a philosopher, he did have a lot of common sense and he wanted to preserve the values that made our country great. It has been many years since my grandparents passed on and I find myself having many of the same concerns that they had. I have come to the conclusion that being a free American comes with a huge responsibility.
While all of us want to provide the next generation with a good education and all of the things that they will need in life, I feel that my generation could have done better in conveying the values that have made our country great. This country was built upon the ideals of sweat, innovation and hard work. As I look across this nation I see that those values are not cherished nearly as much as they used to be. For some reason we have substituted the traits of dependency, class envy and class warfare. I was raised in a conservative home and those ideals were ingrained in me throughout my childhood. It was hard for me to even envision anyone not having those same values. Over the last 10 years I have seen a marked change in our culture, and I had a hard time figuring out what was the cause of the shift. Recently I was watching a conference and one of the speakers gave a simple answer to the reason why.
My grandparents and their generation are called America’s Greatest Generation. They fought and won World War 2 and built the industry and standard of living that all of us enjoy today. Their children were called the Baby Boomers and the Greatest Generation instilled in them a strong work ethic and a love of freedom. To understand why our country is changing all you have to do is to look in the obituary column in your local paper. We are losing the Greatest Generation more and more every day. Maybe we are a victim of our own success; while we were working extra hours to buy some trinket we probably didn’t need in the first place, we neglected to pass on the true values of what it means to be an American.
Ask yourself a simple question. How long does it take for a nation to go from freedom to bondage? The answer is, one generation. Several years ago I heard president Ronald Reagan state that freedom can be lost in one generation. We Americans need to heed his warning and re-establish the values of the Greatest Generation while we still have time.
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