A few weeks ago I watched a piece of video that stuck with me for days. A young man on the ground, in trouble, calling out for help, and the officers standing over him seemed frozen, unsure whether to act. Commentators picked it apart for hours and never landed on a real answer. But if you've spent any time around young folks lately, in a classroom, a church basement, or a 4-H barn, you already have a pretty good idea what's going on. Those officers weren't unusual. They're a symptom.

I've spent the last several years teaching Constitution classes and Biblical Citizenship courses right here in Lewistown, and I've had a front row seat to how a whole generation is being taught to see the world. It isn't through algebra or American history the way we learned it. It's through a lens that sorts every person, every event, and every institution into one of two buckets: oppressor or oppressed. Once you're taught to see the world that way, right and wrong stop mattering as much as which bucket you or the other fellow falls into.

That's not an accident, and it isn't confined to the coasts. It's in the textbooks, it's in the museum placards, it's in the algorithm feeding a fourteen-year-old's phone at midnight. A kid can tell you three things happened in history and precious little else, but he can tell you exactly who was the villain in each one. We used to raise kids on personal responsibility, hard work, and the idea that your word and your handshake meant something. Somewhere along the way, a lot of us handed that job off to the schools, the screens, and the culture, and we assumed it would turn out fine because it turned out fine for us. It didn't occur to us that raising a kid today is a different job entirely than the one our folks had.

I don't say any of this to scold young people. I say it because we, the parents and grandparents, are the ones who let the job slide. We were raised by a generation that didn't need to explain personal responsibility out loud, because the whole culture around us reinforced it. Church, school, the co-op, the ballfield, all of it pointed the same direction. That's not true anymore, and pretending otherwise is how we keep losing ground.

Here in central Montana we still have something worth protecting: a culture where a handshake counts, where a kid learns to work by actually working, and where right and wrong aren't up for renegotiation depending on who's involved. But we can't assume that gets passed down automatically anymore. It has to be taught on purpose, out loud, at the kitchen table and in the classroom, the same deliberate way you'd teach a kid to drive a tractor or throw a rope. That's exactly why I keep showing up to teach these citizenship courses, and why I think every parent and grandparent in Fergus County ought to be having these conversations with the kids in their life, not waiting for someone else to do it.

The fix isn't complicated, even if it isn't easy. Teach gratitude instead of grievance. Teach that dignity comes from carrying your own weight, not from which group you belong to. Teach forgiveness over score-settling, and love of country instead of contempt for it. None of that requires a new law out of Helena or Washington. It requires us to stop assuming somebody else is handling it. Save our kids, and we save this way of life we've built out here. That work starts at home, and it starts now.