Somehow, my name got put on a list.
Everyone’s experienced it at some point. Either someone got ahold of my name and added me to their marketing list, or the YouTube algorithm automatically started sending me a new genre of video. Instead of the normal YouTube advertisements, I started getting a particular type of video—army recruitment ads.
Unlike most of the ads on YouTube, these videos made me pause. In spite of myself, my mouse hesitated over the skip button, and I couldn’t help but watch the video. Epic music swelled in the background. A beautiful foreign landscape fell away as the camera soared away from the vantage point of a helicopter. Jets soared across the sky at impossible angles. Fit young men and women stared at me, challenging me. Then, as the screen faded to black, a tag line appeared, “The Next Greatest Generation is Now.”
I have to admit, they got me. I was interested.
Maybe I was the correct target audience after all because these videos haunted me. I started watching these recruitment ads every time they popped up. Something stirred in me—a sense of patriotism or pride. I became captivated. I watched as people my age or younger did super-human feats, both physical and mental. And all with a sense of confidence that I rarely experienced. I felt called to be something greater than I am.
The tag line in particular stuck with me. “The Next Greatest Generation” is an audacious claim. How can we—the so-called lazy, anxious, depressed, self-obsessed, screen-raised youth possibly lay claim to this moniker bestowed upon our great-grandparents, who fought and died for the freedoms that we so casually abuse and take for granted?
I thought long and hard about this. The Greatest Generation truly was something special. After Pearl Harbor, there was such a sense of righteous anger in the country. Young men lied about their age to get into the service, and not just occasionally. It happened a lot more often than you would think. There were teenagers on the beaches of Normandy. These young men wanted so badly to defend their country that they lied to get a chance to lay down their life for it.
Today, the opposite is true. At the same time as I was watching these army ads, a second type of video started to appear on my feed, a very different type of video. This new type of video came about from the state of affairs at the time, and the general unrest it caused. Russia had recently invaded Ukraine. Talk of World War 3 spread, and there was even a rumor that the draft was going to be reinstated. This was all false of course, but rumors don’t care about the truth, especially when social media is involved.
There was a trend online. People from my generation—young, healthy people—started posting videos, proudly I should add, about why the Army didn’t want them. They declared to the whole internet that they were too anxious, too lazy, too weak to fight. Or if they didn’t have any physical excuse, they thought they could simply decline. I could hardly believe what I was watching. These people seemed proud of their incompetence. They were so used to playing the victim that they didn’t have any sense of responsibility or the ability to sacrifice for someone other than themselves. I was disgusted. Not that long ago, young men lied to get into the service. Now, my peers plan on lying to get out of it. What would our ancestors think of them? What do our enemies think of us?
These two very different types of videos played in my head over and over.
I think there is a very big decision that lays before us today. A decision about who we are, the kind of people we want to be, and how we will be remembered. We can either follow in the footsteps of those great men who went before us, or we can choose the easy route.
Are we the Next Greatest Generation? I think that’s our choice to make.