In Greek mythology, many themes still apply today. Consider the quest to clean the Augean Stables. The task was one among the “twelve labors” assigned to the Greek hero Heracles to accomplish. The Augean Stables belonged to Augeas, the king of Elis, who kept 6,000 head of cattle there. After 30 years, much bovine scatology had accumulated, making clearing it out a challenge. Indeed, the job of cleaning the stables, having been put off for three decades, was generally accepted in this mythical tale as an impossible job.
Nevertheless, think about that task today in light of the mess that has accumulated in America. That would include not only the government mess we have on our hands, but the moral, societal, and cultural dung that has built up, so deep that it would take legions of shovelers to dig away the decay and rot.
Where to begin? Congress would be a good place. There, we are ruled by self-righteous gasbags who crave power over selfless service. They have become an oligarchy that spends more time expostulating on partisan peeves than legislating on genuine issues. They see themselves as our masters, not as servants to the people who are actually the sovereign in our republican form of government. They care nothing about limiting their power as our founders intended. They truly believe they have a mandate to tell us how to live our lives, indeed what we can say and think, rather than to listen to us about how life should be lived. Their lust for power, desire for privilege, and unethical behavior have resulted in a sort of excrement built up around them that would defy the largest of bulldozers.
What of our centers of higher education? There, we find a sort of indoctrination that holds our nation and its founders in contempt. No longer is education the object and intent of institutions of higher learning, itself an oxymoronic term. Higher education has been exchanged for lower expectations. Many students entering college are unable to spell, write, or do mathematics. They leave no better, not knowing how to think, but rather as virtuosos in reciting and spewing the propaganda of activist professors who despise the idea of objective truth. The dung mounds up.
What of our media? Many years ago, men like Walter Cronkite of CBS, Chet Huntley and David Brinkley of NBC, and John Daly of ABC reported the news with the integrity of a Sunday School teacher. They were regarded as honest and factual. People trusted them, saying, “I heard on the news today,” a phrase that in itself communicated trustworthiness. Few like them exist in broadcast journalism today. Contemporary talking heads are advocates for one view or another. They do not pretend to be balanced. They don’t know how. Besides, doing so would drive their obsequious followers to go in search of a new source to satisfy their itching ears for whatever they want to believe on any topic. The waste that surrounds them is deeper than the Grand Canyon.
Not long ago, I had a lengthy discussion with a dear friend and colleague. We served together in the Army. These days, we reflect together, searching for answers concerning the state of affairs that is America. He is of the mind that we are lost, that things have gone too far. Where is the redemption? And then, recovering an optimism that better suits his instincts, he reels back his cast, asking as a second thought, “What must we do?” Indeed, what will it take?
I find myself sharing his doubts about our nation. How can I resist doing otherwise based on what I can see with my own tired eyes? Yet as we talk, we conclude together that our only true hope is in revival, that is, a Christian one where objective truth is at the center of a biblical worldview.
There’s a saying that the best way to get out of a hole in which you find yourself is to stop digging it in the first instance. What will that take? When Heracles settled on how to dig out of 30 years of accumulated dung in the Augean Stable, the myth says he created a hole in the side of the structure and caused two rivers to converge and wash through it to carry the waste away. It was thought to be an impossible task.
Today, we do not need to depend on mythical rivers but rather use the living waters of truth to wash away the corruption that has overtaken our government, society, and culture, which has built up as we allowed our moral compass to be replaced by one that consistently points toward corruption.
It’s time to clean the Augean Stable in America, or we will be buried by what must be washed away.
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