It's very common for teenagers and young adults (term used loosely) to be self-absorbed. Fortunately, the true message from the terrorist attacks is getting through to many of them. While this is a long way from the kind of response a better generation did following Pearl Harbor, I see some positive signs that give me reason for hope.

The following article is on the Wall Street Journal's Opinion page. You'll need to register (name and email address) to read the article yourself. For that reason, I'm violating normal protocol and copying the text here.

The Best and the Brightest

The Best and the Brightest
The kids are all right, but too many professors hate America.

Tuesday, October 2, 2001 12:02 a.m. EDT

Maybe there is something to the old injunction not to trust anyone over 30--at least on campus. Within the confines of the faculty lounges where graying radicals are now ensconced, September 11 may be seen as another example of America paying for its sins. Yet students seem to have recognized it for what it is: their Pearl Harbor.

You might not know that from the professors making it into the headlines. At a recent University of North Carolina "teach-in," one lecturer told students that if he were President, he would first apologize to "the widows and orphans, the tortured and the impoverished and all the millions of other victims of American imperialism." Over at Yale, Professor Paul Kennedy asked the audience to understand the reasons people had for their hatred of America--notably our military and economic power, our culture, and more. University of Texas Professor Robert Jensen wrote that the attack "was no more despicable than the massive acts of terrorism . . . that the U.S. government has committed during my lifetime."

Imagine, then, what it must be like for such professors to look out at their campuses to see hordes of students with American flags flying from their bicycles, sticking out of their backpacks, stuck in their pockets, or emblazoned on T-shirts with messages that promise, "We Won't Forget."

The jolt must have been even greater at Harvard, where the Crimson, the student paper, ran an editorial pegged to a poll showing 69% of Harvard students in favor of military action against the perpetrators of the attacks. More telling still was the Crimson's forthright response to what it called "bad news": namely, that only 38% of Harvard undergraduates said they were willing to take part in military action themselves. As the editors tartly observed, one worries for the character of a student body that favors a military response "only as long as they can continue to sit comfortably in Cambridge." If students "are willing to enjoy the benefits of the national defense," the paper concluded, "they must not refuse when called to serve."

At the Yale Daily News, the editors put it this way: "After September 11, 2001, we came of age as a generation. We agreed on an agenda. We faced the same enemy. And now the government is asking us: Will we serve?" They concluded by answering their own question: "We must answer the calling of our time--for if we don't, who will?"

Plainly what these and other bursts of campus clarity suggest is that notwithstanding the decades of effort put in by the thought reformers--the creators of the language police, the campus harassment codes and the rest--these people never did capture many hearts and minds. In its more overt forms on campus this ideology tends to manifest itself in Vietnam nostalgia, as it did at the University of Wisconsin at Madison where students chanted "One-Two-Three-Four, we won't support your racist war."
More subtly it appears too in those op-eds indicting an American society whose people have now got their comeuppance. Its adherents seem particularly bothered by an America that continues to celebrate memories and films focusing on World War II.

They have good reason to be bothered by such recollections. On June 12, 1942, his 18th birthday, a young Andover graduate put off his Yale education to enlist in the U.S. Navy. It was six months after Pearl Harbor. The young man's name was George Bush.

Maybe they're not beating down the doors of the Army, Navy and Marine recruiters up at Cambridge or New Haven. But if the reactions of their college papers to September 11 is any indication, America's young have learned something about their obligation to a free if imperfect society--even if it wasn't in the lesson plan.