Today is a typical wintery day in Virginia. It’s chilly, wet, and cloudy. There’s nothing romantic about that. Dismal weather wins out today.
Such a day reflects how many in America see the state of our nation. There is so much to worry about that it’s hard not to sink into dreariness about our future. The class warfare that has descended on this nation is destructive. The most recent version of the culture wars embodies a hatred of America’s founding and those who brought us into being. In that regard, the effort to pollute the minds of our youths is very much in vogue. Moreover, power-hungry “woke” politicians are quite willing to pile onto the hate-America-first bandwagon as they attempt to outdo one another in proposing policies and legislation that undermines our Constitution, republican form of government, and free enterprise system. It’s hard not to feel dismal when the rising generation hates your nation. No sunny days seem to be in our forecast.
Creeping corruption besets us in the form of a calculated indoctrination to radical beliefs. Climate alarmism is central to this effort. So too is the perversion of civics education and history lessons that our children have been force-fed for years, to say nothing of the subtly anti-Judeo-Christian undertones in education from kindergarten to college. It needs to stop. The very idea that education has taken this turn is both depressing for the spirit and destructive to freedom as we know it.
Indeed, the injuries of time—and there are many—have had a devastating impact on the culture of our nation and our ability to sustain freedom. Christian apologist Os Guinness reminds us that the people of any nation can be judged by what they hold as precious, indeed the first love of a nation. Guinness points us to the words of Saint Augustine of Hippo who called this affection, in effect, a “loved thing held in common.”
Indeed, as Augustine wrote, an assemblage of people are “bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love,” and in order to understand their character, “we have only to observe what they love.” For a nation like France, that love may be their culinary excellence or their accomplished vintners. For the United Kingdom, its long-standing admiration and affection for its sustained monarchy and traditions. For Japan it could be their devotion to order, family honor, and industry. For Americans, however, our “loved thing held in common” is freedom. At least it used to be until a baneful woke-socialism arose and moved to the forefront of American political activism.
This idea of the injuries of time is an important thing to digest. Many books could be written about it. Indeed, I have begun one. But recognizing the injuries of time takes some analysis. We must actually open our eyes and ears to what is occurring around us to see and understand the nature of the destruction that is being visited on our culture and our freedom, the thing we once loved above all else. How is that freedom threatened?
It’s undermined when we have a government that spends money we do not have, creating a pile of intolerable debt that is sure to eventually collapse our economic system. That result would make the nation ripe for Marxist socialism and the dictatorship that would surely follow.
Indeed, the chaos at our southern border is not exclusively about illegal immigration. It also represents a complete abandonment of law and order. And the solution is not “comprehensive immigration reform.” That’s a diversion. It requires enforcement of existing laws. But since the comprehensive reform illusion is an impossibility, the chaos will persist. And that too is the goal of those who seek to destroy the legitimacy and identity of our republic.
So also is the rampant crime in America that infects our cities and is reinforced by social justice polices designed to weaken law enforcement and punishment for criminals who prey on society. When woke prosecutors are more concerned about the rights of criminals than the rights of victims, that should tell you something about what your government thinks about protecting freedom. And the woke among us want the rest of us to be quite asleep when it comes to what they are doing to destroy or “radically transform” the nation.
What must we do? We must wake up. We must consign wokeism to the trash heap of destructive ideologies that have one object: the destruction of freedom through the corruption of minds. That means we must reclaim our educational system from those who would condemn us to be a subjugated people.
It’s a dreary American day. But when we rise to the occasion to reclaim freedom, our “loved thing held in common,” an enlightening sun will rise with us.
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