Avoid the identity trap
“To get back one’s youth,” Lord Henry says in Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “one has merely to repeat one’s follies.”
Henry’s observation, however, deserves a modern update. In their search for eternal youth, adults now are pushing their follies on the young people of 2016. George Bernard Shaw thought youth was wasted on the young, but today’s progressives see youth as an opportunity to cement their legacy of grievance and division.
Take, for example, a video released by MTV earlier this week that intends to provide New Year’s resolutions “for white guys.” Among the advice these teens provide is to “recognize that America was never ‘great’ for anyone who wasn’t a white guy.” A young man offers that “Blue Lives Matter isn’t a thing,” and a bespectacled young woman pleads with white men to “learn what mansplaining is and stop doing it.”
It would be a shame for today’s young people to ignore the “mansplaining” of white guys like Wilde, for instance. Wilde, of course, was gay — not in the “bake me a wedding cake or I’ll file a federal lawsuit” way, but in the “you could spend the rest of your life in a 19th century prison” way. And the way he lived a life of independence from the domineering, restrictive mores of his time should be inspiration to young people of any era.
It just so happens that those restrictive voices are now those on the left, policing language and behavior in order to foist their grievances on everyone. Presumably, MTV isn’t run by 16-year olds, so this is exactly what the adults at the channel are trying to do — imbue children with their same divisive ideals and biases.
MTV, of course, has been gasping for relevance ever since music fans realized they could get their songs and videos whenever they wanted on the Internet. The channel’s target demographic has eroded from college students to young teens to people who can’t find their remotes to change the channel. One of MTV’s flagship shows, “Catfish,” features literally the dumbest people left in America: teenagers who think they are dating supermodels online, only to realize they have been duped into sexting with large women who can pop the glass eyes out of their head.
In America’s distant history, there actually was a time when young people strived to act older.
But if you’re a teenager today, there’s a cabal of grown-ups who want to make sure you stay frozen in your current mental state in perpetuity. When you’re a child, they want to make it seem like conservatism is a mental problem, making it near impossible for you to get along with someone of a different political persuasion. When you get to college, they will make sure you never hear or see anything that might challenge the beliefs they injected in you as a high schooler. And when you’re an adult, they’ll expect you to show up and scream at Republican electors who try to cast their Electoral College ballots.
But for young people, it doesn’t have to be like this. Take heed of Flannery O’Connor’s advice to “push back against the age as hard as it pushes against you.” (Bonus: she’s a woman, so it’s advice you’re allowed to take!)
You may have noticed that in school, the most admirable kids are also the most subversive. In 2016, rejecting authority means tossing aside the divisive identity politics being fed to you and thinking for yourself.
As Wilde himself said, “everything popular is wrong.” Reject the grievance fad, and you may not be popular, but you’ll enjoy the benefit of being right.
Christian Schneider is a Journal Sentinel columnist and blogger. Email cschneider@jrn.com . Twitter: @Schneider_CM