Hold On To Our Youth

I don’t put much faith in the cliche that youth are our future. It’s true, of course, in the trivial sense, but it doesn’t necessarily suggest that youth will continue to add to our social progress. Do we really have in these dark times politically a realistic expectation that the youth of tomorrow will keep society humming along? Or has this become just an unrealistic, irrational hope, and a way to deflect our blame for how things have gotten so mucked up?

There’s also the undertone in the cliche that the youth will do a better job of perfecting that future than we older folks have done. A cynic can genuinely feel that there’s not much reason to believe this will happen though. After all, weren’t the grown ups of today the youth of past generations? We older folks were once the hope for the future of our parents’ generation. 

Honestly, I don’t think we today can take credit for creating rosier prospects for the generation coming along. Of course, this doesn’t apply to those born to privileged and rich parents. The privileged as a class are known to be highly protective of their privilege and stingy about sharing it.

Many of the youth of today won’t even make it into the future. It’s a sad reality of the opioid crisis that many older people are destined to outlive many younger people. Some will die in the here-and-now of ill considered choices they’ve made. Our home state of West Virginia leads the nation in per capita drug overdosing and drug related deaths. That’s one reason. 

To a large extent, those opioid deaths are of young people. Other young people we lose because of choices imposed on them by government and industrial policies that don’t do them any favors. In West Virginia, again, witness our failed extractive industries — timber, coal, gas — which sacrificed our economic future and our communities because we didn’t reinvest the profits from those industries back in the state. We kept the lights on for the country and dimmed our own lights.

West Virginia lost three percent of its population between 2010 and 2020, mostly among the young. The state is on track to having the oldest population on average in the country. It’s almost there now.

Yet our politicians bemoan the so-called border crisis and want to erect barriers to those who might be willing to settle here. In any event, immigrants aren’t moving here, so we’re trying to keep out people who don’t want to be here anyway. As of 2022 almost 14% of the U.S. population is foreign born. In West Virginia that number is 1.8%. Not even the poor and disadvantaged immigrant wants to come here.

I hope those young West Virginians who do leave will make a good future elsewhere, though I’m sorry for our state. How much of a future does a state have if it gives up its youth?