Recently I was thinking about how blessed we are in our modern existence. Like many of you, I’ve travelled throughout Europe. In the process I’ve visited museums and castles where images of past kings, queens, dukes, and duchesses graced the walls. There were also images of common people doing common things, frequently in an idyllic setting. Yet the static images of both rich and poor don’t tell the whole story of the life they lived or their ignorance.
Pictures of the nostalgic past are deceiving, especially of everyday life. Consider this. When you arose this morning, you didn’t have to use “the facilities” in a small structure remote from your home. You didn’t need to go to a stream or well to carry in buckets of water to cook, wash, and clean throughout the day. If you were ill, there was no medicine chest containing drugs that would relieve your symptoms. Your food wasn’t always safe and not refrigerated as needed. You had to cook by building a fire. And when you retired in the evening after worrying about being robbed or beaten by vandals on the way home, you didn’t sleep in a soft bed inside an air conditioned home that might burn down from the stray embers of the fire that could spread from the hearth where you cooked your dinner that evening.
Yes, we live with many blessings. But we also live among ignorance. Years from now, people will see pictures of how we lived and marvel at how far we advanced, particularly in America, from just the 19th century. But will they wonder from the static pictures of our lives, “how could these people, so blessed in comfort, have been so seemingly ignorant as they stood idly watching their freedom destroyed?”
Millions of people who have gone before us didn’t have the opportunities we have had to learn history, understand it in its full context, comprehend the mistakes, and chart a way forward to sustain it. But in today’s America, where we live in relative luxury, not unlike the royalty of centuries ago, we squander the blessings of liberty and make a mockery of freedom when we are ignorant of our past, our founding, and indeed our destiny. This is quite a different matter from taking for granted the comfort of the present age. When we take for granted our freedom, law and order, and public safety, we stand on shaky ground. For in that environment, malevolent people can take advantage of our ignorance of civics and history to craft an image of a life they want for us that we may not seek for ourselves. The people who would deprive us of our liberty, our orderly society, and our safety do so with the permission of their own malicious consciences.
They will use any argument to create a false picture of life today. Among these narratives they claim that we are unable to care for ourselves; that religion and traditional values enslave us; and that an expansive all-knowing, all-consuming, and all-powerful government is needed to ensure we are able to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”, the fundamental promise of our Constitution. It’s all nonsense. Indeed it is ignorance—and not in a passive way—that fails to appreciate the comforts of life in America today. No, it is a pestilential ignorance in too many of us that is manipulated by a few among us who are very aware of what they are doing.
History is filled with these bad actors, those who would exploit our ignorance to rule over us. They crave power over us to the exclusion of our individual liberty. They use the most contemptable notions to justify their ends, including class warfare, the demonization of faith, or the false and malicious assertion that we are a racist society. America is not fundamentally a nation of selfish people who seek to keep people in designated classes. We are a people who seek and want others to seek opportunity. America is not fundamentally a land of religious bigotry. We value religious liberty and appreciate its influence in shaping us as a people worthy of self-governance. And America is not fundamentally seething with racial hatred. Yes, there have been some very awful occurrences around race recently, but no nation on earth has done more to repair a legacy of racism at its founding than America has since abolishing slavery. There is more to do, but the people who would exploit racial tension to tear down our society are themselves engaging in behavior that is not simply lamentable, but condemnable.
Years from now, what will people think of the static pictures of our age? Will they see a blissful existence, or blissful ignorance that paved the way to our national destruction?
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