The Power of Youth

So, here's a quick thought for you, culled from an unremembered website (I can remember what it said, but not where it was!) and an Agatha Christie political suspense novel.

I get a lot of email from conservative interest political groups. One of them contained a link to an article that they had posted on their website. This article was written by a homosexual activist. This writer claimed that the homosexual movement had converted the majority of youth between the ages of 18-24 and therefore the war was won. They were now concerned with the little skirmishes that would take place as the views of the youth grew to take place over the more conservative views of their elders. Ultimately the youth would be adults and their views would define the political and social climate. The war--won in one generation.

I didn't find this difficult to believe at all. Talk to any bishop of any California LDS single adult ward and he will tell you that his ward members are struggling with the idea of taking a firm stand against homosexual marriage. And these are our kids! It is a walk in the park to convert to homosexual rights any non-religious kid. After all, who would teach him/her any reason to object?

This shouldn't shock us. For many years our kids' most go-to sources for information: school and the media, have been preaching the doctrine of sexual tolerance. No, more than tolerance--they teach the full acceptance of the current "in vogue" sexual deviances i.e. homosexuality, transsexuality, and the like.

Anyway, that little article has been swimming around in the back of my brain and then I read this by Agatha Christie:
"They--whoever they are--work through youth. Youth in every country. Youth urged on. Youth chanting slogans--slogans that sound exciting, though they don't always know what they mean. So easy to start a revolution. That's natural to youth. All youth has always rebelled. You rebel, you pull down, you want the world to be different from what it is. But you're blind, too. There are bandages over the eyes of youth. They can't see where things are taking them. What's going to come next? What's in front of them? And who it is behind them, urging them on? That's what's frightening about it. You know, someone holding out the carrot to get the donkey to come along and at the same time there is someone behind the donkey urging it on with a stick."

She goes on to remind her readers of Hitler's Youth and how they were used so effectively in WWII.

She adds, "What is being promoted, you must understand, is the growing organization of youth everywhere against their mode of government; against their parental customs, against very often the religions in which they have been brought up. There is the insidious cult of permissiveness, there is the increasing cult of violence. Violence not as a means of gaining money, but violence for the love of violence."

Christie's book was a political thriller (and a rather boring one at that) written in 1970. But what it said about youth really struck me. I felt a strong sense of their power and their vulnerability. Am I giving less credit to their individual strength of mind and their openness to the Spirit of God? Probably so. Every generation of youth is bombarded with the most liberal of social ideals and some choose to adopt them and some choose to stand fast with higher morals. Hm. I'll be thinking more about this. What do you think?