There is much wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth going on concerning a poll showing U.S. high school students are indifferent to freedom. (The image, by the way, is from The Minhdonian National Gallery.)

There should be no surprise. This may be the most closeted generation of young people ever. How in the world do you expect them to value something none of them have ever been given?

Today's high schoolers have been told "no" in the loudest possible terms since they were babies. Say no to drugs. Say no to sex. Get your rock from the Disney Channel. Get your rebellion from Nickelodeon.

If they have newspapers in high school these are routinely censored. Even college papers are censored, and closed if they trouble authorities in any way. Kids are even punished for publishing diaries on the Web, even anonymously.

Kids live in a world of V-Chips and drug tests, of mass media with Cyber-Nanny software. It's a comfortable world, for most of them. They're driven from school to ball-field, from day care to proms, but constantly warned that one step over the line will kill them, literally kill them.

No wonder they don't care about freedom.

And I'm not saying this from a sense of moral superiority. I've got two teenagers of my own. They're as closeted as their peers. Although I love them dearly.

My daughter is far more socially conservative than I am. She is a wonderful girl, but she will turn 17 this month and she is still very much a girl.

I'm told I'm lucky. She doesn't care about boys, she doesn't rebel in any meaningful way, she's a very cautious driver, she looks down on me if I turn the music up or have a beer while cooking dinner.

She lives mainly in a world of her imagination, and I know there are monsters there, but they're not real. By that I mean they're not nuanced. She doesn't know, for instance, that evil believes in its inherent goodness - there is no "nyah-ha-hah" to identify it. She doesn't know the Anti-Christ may appear as a preacher. She's sensitve and she'd like to stay that way.

My son, who is 13, is far more argumentative. Recently he spouted off about how the South may have had a point in the Civil War, that there were other issues other than slavery. This, as I have learned most painfully, is a lie. Without slavery the South's antebellum economy could not work. And slavery enslaved the slaveholders in sloth just as it enslaved the slaves, as Fredrick Law Olmstead showed clearly in his New York Times articles.

Will they change? Yes. Time will change them, events will change them. My daughter promises to move to Canada if drafted, and I'm proud of her for that. My son does show signs of rebelling against authority -- mainly mine -- and while it hurts I'm proud of him for that.

There is hope. These people are the future.

But their parents failed them. We failed them.

This poll is proof.