"Civilization is always just a few weeks away from becoming not-civilization"

If you're a college-age American, consider the following:

Older people know something young people can't know:  That civilization is always just a few weeks away from becoming not-civilization.  This isn't a failing by the young, but simply because demonstrations of this hard truth only happen every 20 years or so.  So college-age Americans don’t remember 9/11--the last convincing demonstration of this inescapable axiom of human experience--because they were at most a year or two old when that happened. 

I routinely ask my college students what they know about 9/11, and WW2, and the Berlin Wall, and conditions in Venezuela.  The answer is, almost nothing accurate. 

And let me add that it's not their fault.  They've been told--constantly--by school textbooks, the Mainstream Media and Hollywood that socialism is great, communism is great, capitalism is evil, corporations are evil, and that the U.S. is the source of most of the world's deaths and problems.  Why would they not believe the seeming authorities who are filling them with lies?