Is it really a blessing to have everything we want?

A few months ago I was walking through New York City with some 20-somethings and they saw a Nintendo Store so we had to go inside.  *eye roll*

They scattered throughout the store chasing Japanese-sounding nonsense names of things I have no knowledge of.  So I grabbed a seat by the door and just people-watched.

I saw a young lady (about 20 years old) with green hair tied in pigtails waiting for some friends.  She was dressed in a costume of some sort and carried a purple backpack.  She looked a bit . . . medicated perhaps?  I don't know.  She definitely looked like she wasn't sure where she was (or who she was, or if she was even there at all).  Disturbing.  When her two friends came over (similarly dressed like digital characters), all three of them slowly made their way to the door in the strangest manner I have seen a group of young ladies move.

And I am not sure they were all ladies, but that is beside the point.

As I looked through the store I saw more young adults that seemed to have everything they would want or need but just look so . . . lost.  I wondered to myself if this is what previous generations had in mind when they thought of prosperity, security and peace.

Fast forward: one month later I stood on Omaha Beach in France.

The largest invasion in history happened on this and a handful of other beaches in Normandy.  Tens of thousands of young men were gunned down in their pursuit of the beach and the defeat of Nazism.  Back home, hundreds of thousands of young men and women joined a war effort that helped us out-produce the world in ships and tanks and jeeps and aircraft.  All of them heroes.  All of them in their early 20's.

As I stood in the water of that beach, I wondered if we could do it again.

In a few weeks, the movie Dunkirk will come out.  I am really excited to see it but I am also nervous that I will see a very different time and culture.  I worry that we live in a time that is so focused on the self that we couldn't rise to the miracle of a Dunkirk or a Normandy.  I worry that we are so prosperous that we don't know what it means to sacrifice for the greater good.  I worry that we might be really good at Pokemon but not so good at defeating real evil.

I worry because we have a president that tweets out insults and the rest of us destroy each other because we have different ideas on religion, politics and life.  Ultra liberals are so smug and ultra conservatives are so obnoxious.  The rest of us are somewhere in between the great divide.  It wasn't always like that.  It used to be that we could disagree and still be friends.  Now we draw lines.  We have the greatest tools of connection at our fingertips and we have never been more fractured.

I worry because our entertainment nightly involves watching people shoot each other.  Then we wonder why people are shooting each other in our cities.  I worry because we have songs that glorify drug abuse and using each other and we wonder why our lives are so empty and our young people don't know what to live for.

We were best when our backs were against a wall.  Is it really a blessing to have everything we want?  Or is the blessing to have our character revealed when we have lost everything we had?

I don't want to lose anything . . . but I don't want to continue limping along here in Babylon - where we have everything we want and all the misery that comes with it.