"Relating to young people is no different than it was fifty years ago.
Instead of pretending to understand, or appreciate their style of music and entertainment, I ask open ended questions and see what comes next. Some young people are quite erudite and intelligent and some are airheads, which tracks with people of my generation.
The difference comes when smoke and vapor issues come up like 'social justice' and personal responsibility. Most young people have been indoctrinated into code words and trigger phrases that they cant define, nor apply with anything more than generalizations and flat out wrong retorts.

I think this is part of being a young adult. You come into awareness of broad social issues, and you take on the surface opinions floating around out there. There is a transition from just accepting what your parents taught you to what you imagine by comparison is "thinking for yourself" as an adult.  Unfortunately today the predominant opinions available are these code words and trigger phrases being trotted out by a media with a very biased agenda. So these young people are NOT actually thinking for themselves; they're taking on the culture around them with no more depth than when they simply accepted what their parents told them as a child. 

The next step in maturity is to dig deeper. Rather than believe for example that women are being unfairly compensated for work because of sexism just because you keep hearing this in the media and all your friends believe it, you question whether this is in fact true, and you work at gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the issue. This requires applying critical thinking, objectivity, willingness to accept new information, and so on. To fully appreciate the women's compensation issue, you even need to have a working knowledge of basic economics; supply and demand and so forth.  Over time you learn that issues aren't so simple, but there are layers of facts to be considered, that you simply aren't aware of when you first consider the idea.

For example when I was 14 the Vietnam War was in full force.  Because I never fit in with the popular kids at school, my friends were the nerds and rejects, and several of them were taking on the hippie culture. For my part, I saw on TV every day reports of Americans killed. Without much depth of thought or understanding, I took on the opinion the war was "bad" and we should get out of it, simply because my friends thought that and I had no more information than Americans were being killed and some of them were going to be my friends. Indeed a common topic of conversation with my male peers was the draft lottery.

Fortunately at age 14 I had not yet started writing letters to the editor or participating in any demonstrations so my opinion had no effect on society. By the time I started doing those things I had matured and come to a deeper understanding of the whole thing.  I came to understand how we become involved, WHY we were involved, and furthermore, the mistakes we made and the reasons we failed, and the reasons the anti-war activists were in fact wrong and caused much more needless damage, probably even causing us to lose the war. That's the difference between an immature opinion and a fully informed mature opinion.

Such nuanced concepts such as this: No matter whether it is right or wrong to have entered a war, once entered, you must fully support it to win as fast and as decisively as possible or you'll cause massively increased human suffering.  I didn't get that at age 14.  I do now.

I'm not saying my fully formed opinion is the correct one; someone else might have a different opinion but also based on a lot of critical thinking to support it.  There are so many different ways to study a thing we don't all come to identical conclusions.  I'm saying that young people go through a process of maturity that involves increasingly complex steps of thought in forming their views.  IN GENERAL the younger they are, the more shallow their opinion. They may FEEL deeply about it, but that's not the same as having performed deep objective examination.

Rather than talk to a blank wall, its best to simply point out the facts and offer actual examples of things that accomplish something instead of sounding nice and PC.

Yes and you are helping them start the process of critical examination of all the facts. First they need to be made aware that there are facts outside their limited viewpoint. Hopefully that should be all that's needed to get them to explore the matter more deeply. To recognize propaganda is one of the first things they must learn.

I too plant and care for flower beds, feed squirrels and birds, pet the neighbors dogs and engage their kids in discussions about the latest superhero, or really cool video game. When they grow up I try to engage them in substantive discussions about their future and their civic responsibility, which has become so old fashion that its about to become popular again.

Sounds like you're pretty cool.  One of the things wrong with our educational system and our lifestyles in general is that we segregate the generations.  Kids are put into classes with all the same age rather than benefiting from older ones and helping younger ones. Grandparents live in retirement farms now rather than staying in the home with the family. We've lost some of the benefits of young people being exposed to older people's ideas, and old people enjoying being around the optimistic energy of the young.

No one expected the Spanish Inquisition.

Every socialist/democrat in the nation is focusing on nothing but his embarrassments, and tweets. He could cure cancer, balance the budget, unite islam and jews and the socialist/democrat would still find hate in everything and anything. Look at the tweets from Winter! This is all we are inundated with from the MSM because they are all about confirmation bias.

Trump is a piece of shit! screams CNN 'journalist'. The weak minded lap it up like pablum. CNN has one principle job. They sell beer, and chebbys, and deodorant. That is what they do. Their secondary job is mass population manipulation. Moving the entire country further left by flaming the HATE of the president. And they are in good company. ABC, MSNBC, CBS, NYT and all the other outlets are on board the hate Trump train.

Does it feel good down in the ball-sack? I guess so, because aside from one actress being censured for hold the bloody stump of the current president in a picture where she is posed as a serious ISIS inspired lunatic, anything and everything else is fair game. The nose ring is in, and the harness is attached. 'Lead on Alinsky! We are with you!'

I kind of see that is what Trump seems to be doing. He may be sniping a bit with his tweets(I don't have a twit acct, so don't really know), but actually he's kept busy. Just announced a bunch of bench appts, and taking his travel ban to SCOTUS, also doing his thing with the ME, and he's also working on cutting more regs. As well as his roll-out of the infrastructure update. Comey was a side-show Bob production put on by the libs. They got their face on the tube, along with the dog and pony. Trump didn't seem all that interested aside from some late night tweets.

On with the show!

Universities are already letting students segregate themselves at some dorms...

https://www.thecollegefix.com/post/28906/


http://dailycaller.com/2017/05/11/taxpayer-funded-university-creates-segregated-dorm-for-black-people/

Oh, I agree.  Ask the Solyndra folks how that worked out, and people like Al Gore who make money from speaking about it.  I believe he also owned a firm that sold carbon credits.  The other part is the intended, and continued growth of government.  This was another way the liberal/progressive (Dems) could get away with more government, higher taxes, fees, etc, and of course more government employees to administer all of it.     

 Don't forget wealth redistribution. In order to "protect" the less fortunate the government will have to issue "credits" to them via the IRS and other modes.

There's so many people with different agendas it's hard to know what to believe.

When it comes to MMGW, follow the money.   Then it becomes very clear.

She's moderately funny occasionally.  I haven't seen anything of hers in years though.  I'm not sure why she thought anyone would find this humorous though.  With that said, I can't imagine why anyone would care.  The way some people get worked up over nothing, and then say they're entitled because "the left" was so worked up over something similar in the past.  Bah.   I think we're above that.  I think I'll go back to continuing to not pay any attention to her.