It may be a truism,
that youth inclines the youngling
to view with condescension
persons and precepts,
old in fact, or just by their reckoning.

Like youth of yore, convinced
that their age and the knowledge it affords them
far surpasses any before it.

It may also be true
that a measure of rebellion,
an air of supreme confidence,
is healthy in proportion—
as common in young adults
as its manifestation differs,
culture to culture, case to case even.

It may also be true, though,
that these tendencies, otherwise sufferable
as isolated and disconnected occurrences,
local in geography and expression,
are now aggregated and reinforced,
monetized and weaponized,
by pervasive global technology—
into one mean and faceless mob consciousness.

Passionate about social justice,
they eschew any obeisance to the God of justice,
an archaic inconvenience, in their estimation.
Concerned about the natural environment,
they have little regard for the God of creation.

More daring by the day,
to dismantle every restraint,
remotely rooted in religion,
and at odds with their desires—
stranger by the day.

With absolute confidence
in the righteousness of their causes,
a certainty that derives
not from their lived experience,
or of those who have lived longer,
but from the algorithmic aggregation
of faceless like minds,
and the filtering out, by the same means,
of all dissenting voices.

Bristling at imperfection in others,
they are loath to recognize any fault in their thinking,
with little patience for those otherwise persuaded,
playing judge of the motives of others—
jury and executioner
of that sentence of ‘cancellation’
they mete out so liberally.