“…Jerusalem, the city where I have chosen for Myself to put My Name.” (Yahweh speaking, 1 Kings 11: 36)
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For good or for bad, millennials represent the future of this nation.
An article in Algemeiner titled “Survey: Less Than Third of American Millennials Able to Identify Israel on Map” caught my attention. This is how it begins:
Less than one-third of US-educated millennials are able to identify Israel on a map, a new survey has found.
According to the joint study — titled “What College-Aged Students Know About the World: A Survey on Global Literacy” — conducted by the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and National Geographic, a mere 31 percent of respondents knew the location of Israel on a map of the Middle East.
Close to 50% were able to locate Iraq and Iran on a map, with 61% able to identify Saudi Arabia.
A small number of respondents — 29% — were able to identify Indonesia and its distinction as the country with the largest majority Muslim population in the world.
CFR and National Geographic concluded that the survey “revealed significant gaps between what young people understand about today’s world and what they need to know to successfully navigate and compete in it.”
Millennials are called Generation Y. There are no precise dates that define when they were born, but it is generally accepted that they were born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s.
They follow Generation X. It’s the cohort that followed the Baby Boomers or people who were born in the years following World War II. Like the millennial cohort, there are no precise dates that define the beginning and end of Generation X, but it is generally accepted that they were born between the early to mid-1960s and the early 1980s.
Tracking the attitudes and beliefs of these cohorts tells us a lot about our country and the rest of the world. Baby Boomers were born to parents who had experienced two cataclysmic events virtually back-to-back: the Great Depression and World War II.
Although Baby Boomers may not have heard much detail about either catastrophic event from their parents and grandparents, their attitudes were shaped by them. Following World War II, the United States was the world’s only economic and military superpower. Although the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons shortly after the war, it did not have the industrial capacity to fuel the economic growth for which the U.S. was well-known.
During the war, Europe’s and the USSR’s industrial capacities were decimated. It took decades for them to redevelop what they had lost. The industrial capacity of the U.S. was untouched by the war. In fact, during the war the industrial capacity of the U.S. grew to become the greatest that the world had ever seen, and the difference between the industrial capacity of the U.S. and the industrial capacity of any other country was gigantic.
That’s why following World War II the U.S. sat alone atop of the world’s socioeconomic ladder. In effect, we wrote the rules by which the world had to live. Importantly, thanks to Bretton Woods, the U.S. dollar became the global reserve currency. I’m skipping some significant details, but that ended up meaning that every country had to stockpile dollars to buy oil. Since every country uses oil, even our enemies had to maintain a stockpile of dollars to stay afloat.
Following World War II, the U.S. could do practically anything it wanted without immediate negative repercussions. We took full advantage of the opportunity to live beyond our means and to mainstream things that are loathsome to Yahweh. The parents and grandparents of Baby Boomers created a welfare state that could not be supported without the economic advantages afforded the U.S. following the war. Even worse, the very idea that things would change was foreign to them, but the world did change.
Baby boomers grew up during a time when the “anything goes” mentality was in full swing. They continued the excesses of their parents without giving it a second thought. Their children, the Xers, did the same thing, but the world started to change on them. Even so, they continued the excesses of their parents, but pressure on the U.S. was growing as Europe, Russia, China, and other countries around the world were regaining strength.
That’s the world that millennials were born into. The world has fundamentally changed, but the thinking of our political, business, and religious leaders virtually all of whom are Baby Boomers or Generations Xers has not changed. They continue to behave as though they can do whatever they want without consequence. The facts tell us plainly that that philosophy leads to disaster, but Boomers and Xers continue to behave as though we live in a world that ceased to exist a long time ago.
As the article above suggests, as a group millennials in the U.S. are not well-informed. That’s a vestige of their parents and grandparents thinking. They weren’t well-informed either, but they didn’t care because it didn’t matter. They could get along nicely even though they were oblivious to the world around them, but that’s not true any longer.
Millennials face a different world. Unlike their parents and grandparents, they have to care about the world around them because it matters a lot. As a group, they may be ignorant about many things, but they know that their well-being depends on adjusting to the new reality. They are open to different ideas—ideas that have a chance of working. They want to know the truth. Our job is to tell them the truth, and show them that it is the truth.
It should come as no surprise that millennials are more conservative than their parents. They have no choice. They have to be. That’s why Hillary Clinton and the Democrat Party are having such a hard time getting through to millennials. Clinton’s ideas and the ideas of the Democrat Party are firmly rooted in the past. They are Boomers to the core, and evidence doesn’t matter to them. They still live in a world where anything goes, in a world where there are no consequences for bad behavior. Millennials are smart enough to know that that way of thinking leads to disaster.
There are roughly 76 million Baby Boomers alive today in the U.S. There are roughly 65 million Generation Xers alive today in the U.S. But there are more than 83 million millennials alive today in the U.S. For good or for bad, millennials represent the future of this nation. Keep that in mind as you pray for our country, and don’t pass up the opportunity to share what you know with them. Deep down in their hearts, they want to hear it. They know that they need to hear it.
Interestingly, millennials will probably determine the outcome of the 2016 presidential election. That’s worth considering.
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His Name is Yahweh, the website, is a companion of the book His Name is Yahweh.
To see videos that explain the importance of God’s Name, click here.
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SnyderTalk Comment:
Prime Minister Netanyahu is telling the truth. Problem is most people don’t know it’s the truth.
My niece, Danielle Ward, who is a millennial and her mother spent a week with Katie and me in Israel in May. Danielle is very smart and well-informed by today’s standards. While we were together, she told me repeatedly, “Neil, this isn’t anything like what I’ve been told.”
I could see it in her eyes. I could hear it in her voice. She was shocked because she had been told a bunch of lies, and she knew it. Problem is most millennials don’t hear the truth, so they buy into the lies without reservation or hesitation.
Lies don’t become the truth simply because people believe them. They remain lies for eternity. Millennials need to hear the truth, and they need to be shown evidence that it is the truth. We owe it to them to tell them what we know.
Yahweh holds us accountable for what we should have known. The truth where Israel is concerned is easy to ascertain. Simply reading SnyderTalk reveals it.
My niece, Danielle Ward, and me at the top of the Mount of Olives in May 2016.
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“The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one; I in them and You in Me, that they may be perfected in unity, so that the world may know that You sent Me, and loved them, even as You have loved Me. Father, I desire that they also, whom You have given Me, be with Me where I am, so that they may see My glory which You have given Me, for You loved Me before the foundation of the world.” (John 17: 22-24)
See “His Name is Yahweh”.
