Remember ‘Gen F’ — for Founding

In the run-up to Independence Day, Gallup found a record low 38 percent of citizens are “extremely proud” to be Americans. That’s ominous in a republic in which 85 percent of adults, according to a recent AP-NORC survey, say we’re headed in the wrong direction.A nation that lacks pride cannot long endure. Consider the Hapsburg Dynasty, whose sense of patriotism and nationhood ebbed with each new generation until it collapsed — to paraphrase a British comedian, Eddie Izzard — like a cake left in a cabinet.For them as for us, it’s young people who are disillusioned. While 80 percent of citizens ages 55 or older told Gallup they were “extremely or very proud” to be American, only 48 percent of those between 18 and 34 felt the same.When you’re not invested in your country, you won’t fight to protect it, as Quinnipiac found in its March poll: 38 percent of Americans said they would flee if facing an invasion like Ukraine.So, despite the endless playing of Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” this weekend, there is not “pride in every American heart,” and no wonder. Patriotism is assaulted, including by the 1619 Project fixing that year as “the country’s true birth date” because of slaves arriving, though not all the Founders were slaveholders.Still, it would be no surprise to the patriots at Independence Hall that they had shortcomings. John Adams lamented, “We are deficient in genius, education, in travel, fortune — in everything.”Nonetheless, they endured, giving us the constitutional tools to create “a more perfect union.” Our revolutionaries did not declare — as communist ones do — that they’d achieved utopia and that you had better revere them as infallible gods or else.To restore patriotism in the young, we can help them see themselves in the Founders, who were also disaffected idealists who felt unserved by the establishment and believed they could do better.This was “a young person’s war,” as the author of the Yankee Doodle Spy Series, S.W. O’Connell, described it to me. “A lot of the heroes and heroines were barely teenagers during this period.”“These would have been Gen Z, Gen Xers, millennials,” he said. “General Washington, one of the oldest Continentals, was just in his 40s. “They were young people fighting and also diverse, with up to 15 percent of the army at one point being of African descent, including the all-black 1st Rhode Island Regiment.”Three of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence were in their 20s, and 18 were under 40. All had “privilege” as everything from doctors and lawyers to merchants and ministers.They enjoyed lives of comfort rare in the 18th century and had no reason to overturn the status quo. Yet to ensure our liberty they pledged their “lives, fortunes, and sacred honor.”When Benjamin Franklin said, “We must all hang together or we will certainly hang separately,” he was being literal. Yet they kept good cheer.Rotund Benjamin Harrison told waifish Elbridge Gerry of the noose hanging over their heads, “With me, it will all be over in a minute, but you? You will be dancing on air an hour after I am gone.”Adams envisioned that independence would “be celebrated, by succeeding generations … with pomp and parade — with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires and illuminations from one end of this continent to the other.”The Founders loved a good party and would join us at the backyard BBQ if they could. They had flaws, just like we do, but it’s because of their sacrifice and vision that we can enjoy our liberties today.The legacy of liberty they left us is something of which to be extremely proud, and ensures that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people will not perish from this earth” — meaning that our nation won’t collapse like a cake.

Remember ‘Gen F’ — for Founding

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