8 Years of Grace Have Led Me . . . Here?

As I sat in my classroom observing the students in the last period of my day today, I was overwhelmed at the stupidity of it all.  It wasn't just the immature frolicking, the banal sense of humor; it was indescribable banality and folly.  It was a lucid moment into the shallow joys and weak thoughts that so many young adults are trained in today.  What follows are the words that came to me in that moment.  They are neither polished nor gracious, but I do not offer them merely because they are "honest" or because they are me being "vulnerable".  I am fully aware that throughout, they are tainted and polluted by a measure of sin (sinners arouse in God both mercy and wrath, but I sensed no mercy in my soul at the moment of writing); I am also fully aware that much of my observations are true, whether or not they warrant the kind of disdain they aroused in me.
Here they are:

I have become hardened, embittered, enraged, awakened to the ills, evils, de-humanizing, self-abasement, superficial effects of this modern world upon these children.  Children - they ought to be new adults, fresh with ambition, glory, hope, perspective, desire, ready to subdue the world for the glory of Christ.  But they are children - childish.  Worse than children, for children are largely ignorant, un-clever, simple; these are far from ignorant, for they are both knowledgeable and skilled in all manner of banal, vile, perverted social behavior (including tales of past and planned sexual exploits), and their thoughts run incessantly toward such empty and fruitless games.  They are wise as serpents and every bit as guilty - they run headlong into deception, self-protection, narrow-minded conceit and neglect of others.  They are simple-minded and addicted to distraction: substance, reality, meaning are heavy, and they cannot support the weight such things carry.

They laugh perpetually and cannot cry, whether from shame or grief.

[moments later....] I just looked up critically at a student who asked a neighbor: "What, you tryin' to say 'shit'?"  Then she saw my visual reprimand and asked me from across the room: "What?  Why you look lost?  You in 'Mr. Tate's' class!"  I feel more lost than I've ever felt.

The hopeless tone remains, but the feeling of despair has, by the grace of God, passed.  It was, however, a very disturbing experience and one I do not wish to repeat.

BHT