The Power of Young Men

This week in Europe, we have seen young men at their worst and at their best. Some rioted, threw stones and looted. Others stood defiantly in the piazza, demanding peace and order.

The energy is not different. The direction is.

I saw that energy in a greenhouse in Southern California, on a hillside green from recent rain. Butterflies moved through the plants. Ladybugs rested on the leaves.

I was talking with U.S. Marines who had come home from Iraq and Afghanistan. I had left MSNBC and was volunteering with returning combat veterans. I asked them why they would go back to the theater of war, tour after tour.

Every one gave me the same answer.

“I have to go back because I can’t leave my friends there in that terrible situation without me.”

They weren’t talking about politics. They were talking about the men beside them. They had seen what those men were up against. They knew what it meant to leave them there. So they went back.

That power can take men back to war. It can also build a future.

Older men in power understand the force of that bond. They can take the loyalty, courage and aggression of young men and direct it toward war. In Ukraine, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that Russian forces were suffering more than 30,000 casualties a month. The number is hard to absorb. Behind it are young men sent into battle by people who do not face the same danger.

Others seek to shame young men for aggression as if condemning the instinct will make it disappear. It will not. Aggression is a force. It can become violence, or it can be a creative force. The question is whether anyone will help young men learn the difference—and give them something worth doing with that energy.

A river needs a channel. Give it one and it can irrigate fields, generate electricity and carry people somewhere. Leave it without direction and it will find its own way. Young men are the same. You cannot shame them into having no anger, no intensity and no desire to test themselves. Those things do not disappear. Without a healthy purpose, the energy turns inward as self-destruction or outward as violence.

We see it lost to gambling, pornography, pot smoking, social media and other forms of escape. I am not saying everyone who gambles, watches pornography or smokes pot is lost. I am saying that when escape takes the place of purpose, a country is watching one of its most valuable resources disappear.

The obvious answer is to give their power somewhere worth going. That requires adults who set a credible vision and trust young men with real responsibility. It requires work worth doing, skills worth learning, teams worth joining and a chance to build something that lasts. It requires discipline without humiliation and expectations without contempt.

This is not only an American question. Every country has young men whose energy could help create its future. Too many are left with a phone, a wager, a screen, a drug or a fight, while the adults around them talk as if they are a problem to be managed.

They are not a problem to be managed. They are a force to be invited into the work of building what comes next.

When young men bring that bond together behind an idea bigger than themselves, anything is possible. The question is whether we can give them a purpose worthy of that loyalty—and a future they can build together.