ISIS is it a different kind of wake up?

Opinion
ISIS is it a different kind of wake up?
Gone are the days that a parent only need be concerned about a âbad boyâ enticing their teen down a destructive path. The âbad boyâ has taken on a much sinister worldwide look. Iâm speaking of ISIS. America was shocked when three girls, 15, 16 and 17 skipped school and ran off to Syria to join the Islamic State and was intercepted in Germany.

ISIS, a terrorist group that uses Hollywood style videos to lure its victims is not the only lure. Slenderman, the internet meme for whom 12-year-olds, Morgan Geyser and Anissa Weier, stabled their classmate 19 times in the back was also an enticement. Why? Geyser and Weier wanted to impress Slenderman, an imaginary internet character.

There is a global war being waged for the minds and hearts of our teenagers. We could in return war against video games and online imagination and of course against ISIS. Would defeating anyone of those change what's happening in our teens? Something much deeper than our enemies is in operation. If ISIS was out of the picture I would suspect something else would take its place.

What lies deep with in many of us, possibly all of us, is a desire to belong to something greater than ourselves. That was exercised at the birth of this nation. Our founding fathers wanted to be more than just 13 colonies that only survived. A new nation found purpose and initiated a cause and birthed the United States of America.

The teen years are a time of searching for purpose. The definition of this word is: the reason for which something exists or is done, made, used, etc. Young people of today have the entire World Wide Web to find their purpose in life. Why do they exist and what are they to do with their life? Some will find it in destructive ways and jump on a cause that is like minded. Others, with the help of parents, educators and churches will find their true purpose and a cause that builds a nation.

A famous line in an American comic strip, "Pogo," states my point: "We have met the enemy, and he is us."

I knew what the purpose of the United States was as I grew up in the sixties. On May 25, 1961, then President John F. Kennedy made the famous moon speech. "First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth."

We were united as one nation for one cause. In that speech was the seeds for the famous words of Neil Armstrong, "One small step for man, one giant leap for all mankind." Never before had the world united in one day as it did on July 20, 1969.

We must unite in order to help our young people find purpose and a cause to live for. The alternative is an enemy that will give them a purpose and a cause they will die for. We can't afford to lose the next generation to an ideology that plots our destruction.

By Randy Tramp