Depends on the 24-year-old...

David Brooks writes today about the sheltered children of the middle class, and makes some one-size-fits-all conclusions.

Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.

But... just as in the healthcare debate, while some of these students until 26 are carried on mom and pop's healthplan, we seem to forget there are plenty under that age independently carrying responsibilities of their own, and even beginning their own young families too.

The only way to force these one-size-fits-all prescriptions on everyone -- taking choices from our young people to financially benefit the Boomers like Brooks -- is to condescend.

"...she doesn't really understand their meanings" at 24, because natch -- she's just weaning herself off Daddy's pocketbooks and with only 2 years left under the covered family plan. Egads!

Bob Herbert, meanwhile, today writes of a different reality. Something tells me the clueless 24-year-olds Brooks is writing about have little in common with Hebert's fighting men and women.

Pity Brooks is so sheltered in suburbia: playing Mr. Mom, driving the kids to their games, and encouraging their organized sports careers with baseball camp for 12-year-olds in Orlando... that he's missing out on the maturity.

How can you write an omniscient column like that, without accounting for all the size differences out here? How do you know the dreams being dreamed; the goals being sought; the sacrifices being made to better oneself, and also, one's country? How can you write about America's young people, when really you're only talking about you and your own? Don't brag of your own short-sightedness and the immaturity of protected youth in your own circles, and then conclude that everyone else's family suffers the same fate. Plenty of us know our purpose well before 24; plenty of us kept our eyes open to the doings of the world around us, and developed independent reading and critical thinking skills, so we don't have to just swallow what the Brooks-knows-best Daddy's of the world are serving up as expertise today.

Call it diversity or different backgrounds or whatever, but Herbert gets it -- the big picture, the interconnectedness, the choices our self-proclaimed wise men like Brooks are making on behalf of future decisionmakers -- the no-nothing 24-year-olds of today.

If only the rest of us would just buy into this master plan, and accept men like Brooks know better and only want the best for us, of course, and our shared world.

Here's Herbert's more grounded take on the growing divide between our young people today:

July was the deadliest month yet for American troops in Afghanistan. Sixty-six were killed, which was six more than the number who died in the previous most deadly month, June. The nation is paying little or no attention to those deaths, which is shameful. The president goes to fund-raisers and yuks it up on “The View.” For most ordinary Americans, the war is nothing more than an afterthought.

We’re getting the worst of all worlds in Afghanistan: We’re not winning, and we’re not cutting our tragic losses. Most Americans don’t care because they’re not feeling any of the tragic losses. A tiny, tiny portion of the population is doing the fighting, and those troops are sent into the war zone for tour after tour, as if they’re attached to a nightmarish yo-yo.

Some kind of shared sacrifice is in order, but neither Mr. Bush nor Mr. Obama called on Americans to make any real sacrifices in connection with either of these wars. The way to fight a war is to mobilize the country — not just the combat troops — behind an integrated wartime effort. To do that, leaders have to persuade the public that the war is worth fighting, and worth paying for.

What we have in Afghanistan is a war that most Americans believe is not worth fighting — and certainly not worth raising taxes to pay for. President Obama has not made a compelling case for the war and has set a deadline for the start of withdrawal that seems curiously close to the anticipated start of his 2012 campaign for a second term.

It’s time to bring the curtain down for good on these tragic, farcical wars. The fantasy of democracy blossoming at the point of a gun in Iraq and spreading blithely throughout the Middle East has been obliterated. And it’s hard to believe that anyone buys the notion that the U.S. can install a successful society in the medieval madness of Afghanistan.

For those who haven’t noticed, we have a nation that needs rebuilding here at home. Maybe we could muster some shared sacrifice on that front.

Amen.