America’s Children Need Us

If we do not protect America’s children, who will protect them? If we say the future matters, the conviction must stick. If we claim moral compass, where does that start? Healthy children means a healthy America – lost, alienated, addicted, mislead, and frightened children, shade the future.

Look around you – at the eyes and expressions of children. Many are frightened, seared souls, harboring anxious hearts. They have an overload of mixed messages and emotions to wrestle, are told they inherit an angry, divided, unpatriotic world. Confusion and fear pervade growing up.

Who’s fault is that? Who has put in their young hearts the idea that the world is ending by climate calamity, covid, or nuclear war, that morality, faith and focus have no relevance, history can be left unlearned or burned, hard things undone, obligations “not for thee,” everything free?

Who has spread the false ideas that skin color defines them, no chance to be all they can be, because some wheel in the sky says so? Who has caused the littlest ones to doubt their identity, misunderstand their born gender, or worse – allowed them to be abused, injected, and figuratively separated from loving parents, laboring to teach self-reliance, life-sustaining values?  

Who has blithely put in their heads the idea that addictive narcotics, from marijuana to fentanyl, represent a viable, harmless escape from the world’s dystopia? Who has abandoned rule of law, pushed political violence as an outlet, opened the borders, defunded and delegitimized key sources of domestic security – the family, church, police, military, moral and civic leaders?

Who has caused children to accept that longstanding American traditions, Christian holidays to expectations of effort and achievement, from hard work and love of the flag to the link between inputs and outcomes, even how to think for themselves and not blame others – does not matter?

Who has intentionally untied the line that holds the ship to dock, one generation to another, our youngest to the nation by focus on truth, sacrifice, history, and what is – what genuinely is – worth respecting and what is not? 

Who has taught irresponsibility and “devil may care” attitude, already spending tax money that must be collected from generations already – burdening the young with $31 trillion in debt?

Who has glibly misinformed, misdirected, mismanaged, and miserably miseducated innocent, trusting, hopeful, and unhurried children – been an evil “the Pied Piper” – until they now spin in countless private puddles of anxiety and unease, soaking up what is not true, often unable to discern truth?

The answer: A society where selfish, self-absorbed adults outrank all who came before and all the nation’s trusting children – born and unborn – who necessarily become the nation’s future. 

Responsibility lies flatly with those in positions of power – those at the federal, state, and local levels of government, as well as teachers unions, media moguls, anchors, and reporters, those running social media, profiting and pilfering, abetting government corruption, complicit in the pushing of untruth, buying advantages, advancing political violence, thinking chaos is fine.

Chaos is not fine. Immorality is not fine. Irresponsibility is not fine. Pushing lies from Marxist equity to dishonoring veterans, corrupting the integrity of defense and justice, dishonoring those who died to establish that integrity – is not fine.

Stripping girls of the right to be girls, compete with girls, not face boys in their locker rooms, and pretending math, physics, biology, culture, faith, and history are fake – is not fine. 

If you embrace lies as truth, think all this does not matter; if you indulge the slips, they soon are slides, and slides accelerate, creating avalanches, until all ends in a pile of rubble at the bottom. 

That is not what we owe children who depend on us for truth, honor, guidance, and selfless devotion to their wellbeing, as others tended to ours. We owe that same level of commitment, responsibility, moral teaching, and love which was accorded us – or better, if we can muster it.

In a nutshell, it is now time to stop pretending, lying, dividing, misguiding, misteaching, mistaking, and making angry, alienated, and fearful those who must learn from us self-confidence, self-reliance, self-discipline, how to think, live, give, love, learn, feel and fight with their hearts, those who depend on us.

Rather than let this once-in-humanity culture slide sideways, imagining children do not need us, or will learn what we do not teach them, or letting leftist ideology kidnap them, we must stop the slide, reverse the tide, take responsibility for the next generation. It is not complicated – but is plenty hard. So, knowing we must protect America’s children, let us get back to it – shall we?

Robert Charles is a former Assistant Secretary of State under Colin Powell, former Reagan and Bush 41 White House staffer, attorney, and naval intelligence officer (USNR). He wrote “Narcotics and Terrorism” (2003), “Eagles and Evergreens” (2018), and is National Spokesman2 for AMAC.