Charlie Kirk on the Youth Mental Health Crisis Adults Created by Shutting Down America
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Charlie Kirk on the Youth Mental Health Crisis Adults Created by Shutting Down America
Charlie Kirk addresses the mental health crisis plaguing young Americans following widespread shutdowns. With one in four young people contemplating suicide in recent months and antidepressants becoming the most prescribed medication for youth, Kirk argues that adults made catastrophic decisions by closing schools, canceling activities, and shutting down the economy for a virus that posed minimal risk to young people. While holding adults accountable for devastating policy choices, he also challenges young people to reject victimhood mentality, take personal responsibility, and find creative ways to succeed despite the harder landscape left to them.
There's a crisis happening with young people in this country the likes of which is difficult to put into words, and the adults have absolutely failed young people in America. It's that simple. We shut down our country for nine months. We told them that you can't have prom, you can't have graduation, no summer sports. If you get even close to each other, you're all going to die.
According to the Centers for Disease Control, one out of four young people have contemplated suicide in the last 90 days. More people have died of suicide in California than from the Chinese coronavirus. There's an epidemic of suicide with young people in America, and if you're like me, you know friends that have committed suicide in just the last couple months, not to mention antidepressant medication is now the number one most prescribed medication for young people across the country.
We now have seen alcoholism, marijuana use, cocaine, and pharmaceutical usage exponentially up. And it wasn't easy to be a teenager before all of this. But we made one of the dumbest decisions ever in the history of society to shut down all of society at once, especially when young people were at more risk of dying from the flu than from the Chinese coronavirus.
The Catastrophic Policy Failure
That is not the same for every single age group. If you're over the age of 50 with pre-existing conditions, this threatens you greatly. But saying that we should shut down all the schools for six months, shut down every social activity, shut down all the sports, and you expect young people to just end up exactly the same—what an unbelievably dumb thing that was to do.
For any politician, I don't care if you're Republican or Democrat, it's actually irrelevant to me. It's an issue of right versus wrong. It's an issue of decency. And they say it's all about human beings—yes, the human beings that are 16 years old that are committing suicide because they have no social contact with anyone. It's about them. For the small business owner that put their entire life savings into a hair salon in Houston or in Austin or in Dallas that is now being forced to close by some maniac politician, some power hungry politician—they are to blame.
Adults Must Take Responsibility
This is a mistake for conservatives. Adults got to start taking responsibility for this country. You just got to start doing it because you are leaving a worse country for your kids. I'm saying this as lovingly as I possibly can. I'm not saying this rooted in condemnation, just very honestly: if you think there's no consequences to this, you're wrong.
We tell young people just work hard and find a job. What happens when you shut down our whole country? What jobs are we supposed to find? That's what adults are saying. That's kind of a conservative mantra, right? I believe it. If we didn't decide to destroy our economy, for adults out there, the way you communicate to young people—and I'm going to talk to young people in a second because there's nuance to this—it has to be more than just "go work hard and get a job" because right now we have completely ravaged the entire landscape economically in our country.
No Excuse for Victimhood
However, for students out there, everything I've just said does not give you a hall pass to go play the oppression olympics. Let me be very clear: my speech to the adults for how dumb the decisions they made in political office and what they let happen does not give you an excuse to all of a sudden do the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez thing where all of a sudden you say everyone before me is awful and give me free stuff and I deserve it. That's actually not true.
In fact, you must admit that yes, there has been some really awful mistakes. You must admit it's going to be harder for you to succeed. But then you're going to say: I'm going to double apply myself. I'm going to get creative. I'm going to find a way out of it. I'm going to continue to act responsibly, act morally and ethically. Sit up straight with my shoulders back, as Jordan Peterson would say. Get my goals sharp and clear. I'm not going to blame other people for my problems. And it's still possible to succeed in this country, because it is.
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