There’s an old saying, often attributed to G. Michael Hopf:
“Hard times create strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.”
We’re living somewhere between stages three and four.
The latest Gallup poll has just confirmed what many Americans have long suspected: Generation Z is the least proud generation of Americans. Just 18% of adults under 30 say they’re “extremely proud” of their country.
Let that sink in.
While men with names etched into headstones in Normandy gave their lives for a world without tyranny, we’ve got TikTok influencers today sneering at the very flag that let them go viral. That’s not cultural progress.
That’s amnesia dressed as activism.
Raised in Comfort, Starved of Gratitude
Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, wasn’t raised in soup lines. They didn’t crouch in the mud of Peleliu or march through the snow at Bastogne. They weren’t drafted. They weren’t rationed. Their schools had air conditioning, their meals had options, and their phones had internet access by the time they were ten.
They grew up swiping screens, not dog tags.
And for all that comfort, all that ease, what did we get? A generation that rolls its eyes at the flag, mumbles through the national anthem, and treats the word “freedom” as if it were just another outdated buzzword from the Reagan years.
When you inherit freedom without paying the cost, you treat it like a subscription service. Cancel any time.
The Tragedy of Unused Inheritance
Ask a Gen Z college student to explain what happened on D-Day. Watch them blink.
Ask them to name a Medal of Honor recipient. Ask them to define the Cold War. Ask them why men with nothing stormed beaches for the sake of people they’d never meet.
They don’t know. And more frightening, many of them don’t care.
This isn’t just a generational divide. It’s a cultural failure. We handed Gen Z the keys to a country bought with blood and sacrifice, and instead of learning how to drive it, they’re arguing over what color the steering wheel should be.
It’s not that they’re stupid. It’s that they’re spoiled. And worse, they’re being taught to believe that America is something to apologize for.
Who Taught Them to Hate Their Country?
This kind of ingratitude doesn’t happen by accident. It’s been baked into the curriculum, blasted through the media, and reinforced on every campus from Berkeley to Boston.
These kids didn’t just wake up one day and decide America was a villain. They were told. Repeatedly.
- They were told that America is racist by default.
- That capitalism is oppression.
- That the Founders were nothing more than slave owners with powdered wigs.
- That World War II was more about Japanese internment than fighting Hitler.
- That freedom of speech is dangerous.
- That national pride is nationalism, and nationalism is Nazi Germany 2.0.
And like all generations, they listened to their teachers.
What we’ve got now is a crop of young adults who think courage means screaming at baristas over pronouns and that tyranny is not being able to post nudes on Instagram without judgment.
Contrast Makes Gratitude Possible
Let’s be clear: there’s nothing brave about trashing a system that gave you everything. There’s no courage in dragging down the flag when you never carried a pack, stood a watch, or held the hand of a dying man who wore the uniform.
Do you want to see real courage?
Look at the men who walked point in Vietnam while the press mocked them back home.
Look at the women who kept factories running while their husbands fought under Patton.
Look at the Tuskegee Airmen, fighting two battles, one against the Nazis, the other against racism, and still flying with honor.
Those people knew what they were fighting for. They’d seen the other side of freedom. They’d lived through hard times, and they earned their patriotism.
And most importantly, they fought for people like me, who were unable to join them due to poor health.
Patriotism Isn’t Perfect. It’s Priceless.
No, America isn’t perfect. It never was. But it has something almost no other nation in history ever had: the humility to improve and the courage to try.
To call that shameful is a luxury only the privileged can afford.
Gen Z has never been told “no” by history. They’ve only been told they’re victims. They’ve never tasted war rations, only safe spaces. And if we’re not careful, they’ll trade the very thing that protects them, the flag, for a world where they get exactly what they asked for: none of it.
Final Thoughts
If the trend continues, the people least proud to be American will one day be the ones asked to defend it.
But here’s the good news. Entitlement doesn’t have to be permanent. And gratitude, once planted, grows deep.
The question is: will Gen Z learn it the easy way, through humility and history, or the hard way, through crisis and loss?
Either way, they’re about to find out what freedom actually costs.
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