Juvenal Delinquency

There was a time, just a few, heartrending generations ago, when the youth of the civilized world would chant, not without a touch of monastic nostalgia,

amō, amāre, amāvī, amātum -

and thereby dedicate themselves to a scholarly fraternity to whose agency we owe the very structure of our western minds.

No longer.

The past is overwhelmed by an implacable present, a march of the now with each step measured in new reward and quickly forgotten in turn.

Antiquity? Antiquated.

The generations of more recent vintage, insulated in their connectedness, have no memory for the past, contentedly occupied with courting their own adolescent sense of irony. Which begs the question:

when the past is utterly forgotten, root and branch, and watchmen of the new generation take up their charge in the world,

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?