The phrase came to me secondhand, but it landed with uncommon force: \u201cPeople in this country just aren\u2019t hungry enough.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A close friend\u2014recovering from a serious health crisis\u2014told me this after an unexpected immersion in something he had rarely watched before: the evening news. Night after night, from a hospital bed, he observed street demonstrations, political rallies, and, in some cases, outright lawlessness masquerading as protest. His conclusion was not born of ideology, but of contrast. He simply could not reconcile what he was seeing with the demands of ordinary life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
How, he wondered, do so many people have the time to march, to chant, to occupy streets, even to burn police cars in the wake of something as trivial as a sports celebration? Who, exactly, is showing up for work the next morning? That question is not as flippant as it sounds. It touches something deeper\u2014something generational.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was reminded of my own college years at a small liberal arts school in Ohio during one of the most turbulent periods in modern American history. Within a compressed span came the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, alongside the upheaval surrounding Kent State and the Vietnam War. Campuses across the country erupted. Classes were disrupted or abandoned entirely as students and faculty alike joined protests.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Yet even then, there was a noticeable divide. The engineering students, the pre-med students, those immersed in the hard sciences\u2014these were not the ones leading demonstrations. They were, almost without exception, too busy. Their academic demands were relentless, their futures uncertain, and their margin for distraction nonexistent. I saw this most clearly on the first day of my freshman year, when 120 students gathered for a pre-med meeting. By graduation, only 12 of us were accepted into medical school. I was the twelfth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many of those who did not make it were, frankly, brighter or better prepared than I was. But over time, priorities shifted. Some were drawn into campus activism. Others into drugs, alcohol, or the broader culture of distraction. The difference was not merely intelligence\u2014it was discipline. It was hunger. That word\u2014hunger\u2014was not metaphorical for earlier generations. It was literal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My friend told me about his mother, one of seventeen children. When her own mother died young, the older siblings assumed responsibility for the household. She married later in life, had two children, and at age forty took a factory job in the upper Midwest. She worked there for two decades, helping put her children through college and medical school. She never attended a protest. Not once. She did not have the luxury of ideological expression. Her obligation was survival\u2014and beyond that, the advancement of her family<\/p>\n\n\n\n
My own father-in-law\u2019s story echoes the same theme. One of eleven children, he grew up in Depression-era Kansas during the Dust Bowl. Conditions were so severe that several of the youngest children had to be placed in a Catholic orphanage simply so they could be fed. Raised in that environment, he left at fifteen, worked as a roustabout, and eventually entered the Navy. His aptitude earned him a scholarship to UC Berkeley, where he became a naval officer and pilot, ultimately rising to the rank of Captain. He and his wife raised eight children.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
He, too, never marched in the streets. He was occupied with something more immediate: building a life, sustaining a family, and ensuring that the next generation would not endure what he had. These are not isolated stories. They represent a broader truth about a generation shaped by necessity. They had every reason to complain\u2014economic devastation, global war, social upheaval\u2014but complaint was a luxury they could not afford. Work was not optional. It was moral, practical, and urgent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Which brings us back to the present: Who, exactly, is sustaining those who spend their days in perpetual protest? There appear to be several categories. First, there are professional activists and community organizers\u2014those whose livelihood is tied to agitation itself. Their role is not to produce goods or services, and they create no economic utility. The can only mobilize grievance. They do not build institutions; they pressure them. In some cases, they destabilize them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Second, there is a cohort of older demonstrators, often animated by broad, emotionally charged narratives rather than specific policy critiques. I recently spoke with several such individuals. Their objections were sincere but vague, centered on general claims about injustice, immigration enforcement, or foreign policy, but lacking depth or factual grounding. Passion had replaced precision and accuracy. Reason and logic were replaced false witness and calumny.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Third, and perhaps most visible, are young people\u2014students or recent graduates\u2014many of whom have not yet assumed the full weight of adult responsibility. Without mortgages, without children, without the daily pressures that come with sustaining a household, they possess something previous generations did not: time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Time to protest. Time to organize. Time to immerse themselves in causes that, however sincerely held, do not yet compete with the immediate demands of survival. None of this is to argue that protest, in principle, is illegitimate. The American tradition includes it. But there is a distinction between protest rooted in necessity and protest enabled by comfort and entitlement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is here that a lesson from my own Catholic upbringing offers a useful analogy. I once complained to a priest about individuals receiving communion while openly supporting positions contrary to Church teaching. His response was disarmingly simple: when you approach the Eucharist, your focus should be on the sacrament itself. If your attention is fixed on others, you have already lost sight of what matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The same principle applies beyond the sanctuary. Work, rightly understood, is a form of vocation. It is not merely transactional; it is participatory. It sustains families, builds communities, and, in its highest sense, reflects a form of stewardship. To be consumed with the actions of others\u2014to fixate on their failures or their politics\u2014can become a distraction from one\u2019s own obligations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A society that loses its respect for work risks losing more than productivity. It risks eroding the very structures that make stability possible: faith, family, community, and shared purpose. The people who endured the Depression and World War II understood this instinctively. They did not have the option of disengagement. Hunger\u2014real hunger\u2014clarified priorities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today, in a nation of unprecedented abundance, that clarity is less common. Many who speak the loudest do so from a position insulated from consequence and a platform of privilege. Their outrage may be genuine, but it is often untested by necessity. Which returns us to the uncomfortable but essential observation: those who complain the most are often those who have never had to choose between protest and survival. They are not hungry enough.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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