How often a teacher hears students proclaiming that they arernnot going to be like their parents. Many teenagers do look veryrndifferent from their middle-aged folks. Like the late Sam Cookrnin the popular rock-and-roll priamel, they don’t know muchrnabout geometry or about the French they took, but they dornknow that they are free to choose. By the time they havernreached the middle of life’s path, to quote another poem fromrnthe canon, they may look one morning into the mirror and seernhow impossible, how quintessentially childish, is the desire tornescape their origins. No one can choose his genes, although hernmay make wise or foolish use of what they afford him. We canrnno more choose our culture and its languages, although we mayrnrefuse to take advantage of what they can give us. A trendyrnacademic recently urged his peers to make a careful selectionrnamong what he called our “cultural baggage.” The metaphorrnhas a certain piquancy. We should not deceive ourselves, however.rnIf our culture and its traditions are baggage, we are notrncarrying it, or paying academic redcaps to haul it behind us. Itrnis carrying us.rnThe regime that now rules the United States believes that itrncan stay in power by keeping its subjects enthralled in ignorancernand importing educated folk from Europe to maintain itsrncomplicated machinery and poor folk from Asia and LatinrnAmerica to do its scut work. Both the regime and its subjectsrnmay soon learn what does arise spontaneously for those whornwill not learn the difficult lessons of the past: hunger, violence,rnchaos, and entropy. Those who will not learn the lessons of Jeffersonrnand Mill are condemned to repeat the fall of civilization.rn”The hardest thing in politics,” writes Regis Debray, “whatrndistinguishes the statesman from the politician, is to want thernconsequences of what you want.” If we want self-esteem andrnmulticulturalism, then we need to learn to want the ethnic warsrnand cultural ghettoes that are their consequences. If we wantrnself-rule and science, then we need to learn to want the hardrnwork and the mental discipline necessary to maintain and usernthe mental infrastructure transmitted to us by the classicalrntradition. If we choose that future, we shall live every day in thernshadow of our superiors, but in return we and our childrenrnwill once again have access to our heritage of freedom andrncreativity.