Greater Threat than ISIS

BY RANDY TRAMP For the Press & Dakotan |0 comments

Gone are the days that a parent only need be concerned about a "bad boy" enticing their teen down a destructive path. The "bad boy" has taken on a more sinister, worldwide look.

I’m speaking of ISIS. America was shocked recently when three girls — ages 15, 16 and 17 — skipped school and ran off to Syria to join the Islamic State and was intercepted in Germany.

ISIS, a terrorist group that uses Hollywood-style videos to entice its victims, is not the only lure. Slenderman, the Internet meme for whom 12-year-olds Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, stabbed their classmate 19 times in the back, was also an enticement. Why? Geyser and Weier wanted to impress Slenderman, an imaginary Internet character.

There is a global war being waged for the minds and hearts of our teenagers. We could in return wage war against video games and online imagination and, of course, against ISIS. Would defeating any one of those change what’s happening in our teens?

Something much deeper than our enemies is in operation. If ISIS was out of the picture, I would suspect something else would take its place.

What lies deep within many of us — possibly all of us — is a desire to belong to something greater than ourselves. That was exercised at the birth of this nation. Our founding fathers wanted to be more than just 13 colonies that only survived. A new nation found purpose and initiated a cause and birthed the United States of America.

The teen years are a time of searching for purpose. The definition of this word is: the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc. Young people of today have the entire World Wide Web to find their purpose in life. Why do they exist and what are they to do with their lives? Some will find it in destructive ways and jump on a cause that is like-minded. Others, with the help of parents, educators and churches, will find their true purpose and a cause that builds a nation.

A famous line in an American comic strip, "Pogo," states my point: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

I knew what the purpose of the United States was as I grew up in the 1960s. On May 25, 1961, then-President John F. Kennedy made the famous moon speech. "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth." We were united as one nation for one cause. In that speech was the seeds for the famous words of Neil Armstrong, "One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind." Never before had the world united in one day as it did on July 20, 1969.

We must unite in order to help our young people find purpose and a cause to live for. The alternative is an enemy that will give them a purpose and a cause they will die for. We can’t afford to lose the next generation to an ideology that plots our destruction.