“It is not the critic who counts … the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming.”
In that calculation, President Roosevelt ingeniously captured the essence of college students in the status quo.
But what I see is that people my age lack a purpose. For my grandparents, purpose was aiding in a war effort. For my parents, it was raising a family and preserving American tradition in a changing world.
From the time of infancy, we have been told that we were going to change the world and do something great. What does that mean?
Here lies the question that haunts my peers, eviscerating their gumption in life and rendering it to nothingness. We require guidance, and with no other mentor in our lives we default to leaning on the little solid ground we can find.
For most of us, the natural choice is a full dependency on our leaders to give us the fire we lack. Hence, I affirm the resolution: The youth of today’s world are becoming more dependent on our government to give us the purpose we lack, an end which we will never meet by the means of polity.
“You’re doing great! You are going to be the change in the world!” I can only grant credence to the former admonishment so often heard in the classroom (the setting which builds the foundation for dependence on distant politicians in an office who have often never resonated with my predicaments) in the sense that self-sufficiency is a thing of the past.
I recall one of my former employers worked as a preteen washing dishes for roughly a dollar an hour. And while I can’t overstate my gratitude that I am fortunate to live in a society where that is not my burden, it is the reality for many. From the time we are brought up from the youngest ages, the home is basically estranged to American students, and consequently we are raised more by the state than by those who exhausted blood and sweat to provide for me.
Once college is completed, accreditations are widely impractical or highly competitive, and vast numbers of graduates pay off their mountainous debt working minimum-wage jobs. With the federal reserve constantly raising taxes, everything is incentivized to disrupt the progress of the middle class, from which the majority of white- and blue-collar workers come.
Emotional appeals are perpetually made to give free aid to young low-income people at the expense of their long-term financial wellbeing, and that of other students. For every thousand dollars in grants to a student, other students are ultimately going to pay a damaging percentage.
What is our purpose? What I can state with confidence is that the means by which we procure the answer to that question is necessarily through our own grit, relying on our own hands to create something beautiful to change the world.
I want to be given nothing so that I will be empowered by my true merit to give everything.
–Madeline McFarland is a freshman at Abilene Christian University and the recipient of a Kendall County Republican Club scholarship.
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