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Recently I heard "Flight of Icarus" by Iron Maiden as I was driving. Always loved that song.
Then the idea popped in my head that the myth's cautionary tale is highly relevant to U.S. culture in 2024. Just what was the cautionary tale regarding the ill-fated flight of Icarus, son of craftsman Daedalus? The gist was to pay heed to the wisdom of those who came before you, because they speak from what they know via experience. As Icarus decided to ignore his father's advice, he ended up doing the very thing his father warned him about, which was to fly too close to the sun, thus melting the wax that held his wings together, and he fell to his death in the sea. We are facing a cultural version of that Icarus-Daedalus relationship. Millennials, and even more so Generation Z, have become quite fond of the idea that everything that came before was produced via ignorance, and thus needs to be abandoned and reworked for a better tomorrow. Instead of stopping at obvious mistakes like chattel slavery that ended in 1866 in the United States, these forward-thinking descendants have gone above and beyond the pale in their attempts to fashion a new world. We now experience things that the world has previously never seen before, and we're told confidently by the new crop of visionaries that this is the kind of progress that will eventually generate a long-vaunted Utopia. Even though many of the new ideas and concepts directly contradict what history and nature itself bears witness to, we are assured that traditional ways are not much better than living in caves. Academia has fed this phenomenon for decades, from the earliest years of the 20th century. The end result is a people who are trading gathered wisdom and knowledge for the concept that freedom means anything goes. Just as Icarus could not be told by Daedalus to use moderation with his elevation while flying away from prison, our newest generations in the United States cannot be told they are wrong, or that the courses they've set their feet upon all end in disaster. One day, when kinky sexual perversions are practiced by grade schoolers and sexual disease, unwanted pregnancies and child rape skyrocket as a result, when euthanasia becomes the preferred way to handle mental stress after pharmaceuticals consistently fail, when most adults opt out of parenting to pursue their own gratifications, when human struggle and death are reduced to forms of entertainment for the elite, when 'living your truth' is reduced to cherishing what the State allows you to have, when the rainbow flag will be the State-sanctioned form of sexual expression and the birth rate plummets while automation increases and the rich become richer as a result, when the human family has been permanently dismantled and children are churned out by State-sponsored indoctrination facilities, and... ...the day comes when you look in the mirror and realize that all the aspects of life that gave it any genuine meaning have been erased, and you are forced to admit that you approved the entire process. I would venture a guess that if Icarus actually existed, he would have experienced a similar revelation just before he hit the water. |