One problem is what both sides are teaching the young
As Burke said: “Example is the school of mankind and they will learn at no other.” It’s a pity that so many adults on both sides in our current struggle have abdicated their responsibilities to start children off with proper examples in life and learning.
On the one side are the textbooks of Saudi Arabia, the daily diet of Palestinian child abuse, the glorification of child martyrdom in Iran, and so forth. One might ask if there is a greater form of societal child abuse in the world than to inculcate impressionable minds with a victim mentality and the notion that this life on this earth is not worth much.
On the other side are the Western and American education systems, where kids learn that “we’re just such a screwed-up nation back in the forties and fifties,” and not that much good about our history. Indeed, as we have written, they learn not too much of anything about some of the critical developments in our history. They’re too busy learning other things. (Forget Abraham Lincoln’s electric cord speech; the kids are lucky if they understand how an electric cord itself works.)
It seems to us that the young on both sides in our current struggle often have to free themselves from much of what they were taught — or not taught at all — as children. It’s ignorance versus ignorance among the young, with a temporary advantage going to the ignorant and aggressive around the world. Fortunately, youthful example usually eventually gives way to the example of life as lived — and so we see some hopeful signs in the stirrings toward freedom of one of the youngest societies on earth.