If you have the sensation of riding the old rickety wooden roller-coaster at Six Flags Over Texas and descending to the landing strip at what feels like 83 miles per hour, welcome to modern America!
All cultures, like all individual lives, experience constant permutations. That’s half the fun and three-fourths of the excitement, but it is also dangerous. Civilizations don’t live automatically. They can die, and do so, as history amply demonstrates.
Think of it: our founding fathers were positive that the country they were creating was a truly remarkable thing, something that the world had never seen. Never! Franklin labeled the adoption of the constitution as “the miracle at Philadelphia.” America was born “exceptional.”
In recent years, however, the philosophical and political left has mocked such an assessment. Pure American hubris, and nothing more, they said. Time now to face the facts and realize America was no more exceptional than, say, Norway, and we should come down off our high horses.
The same crowd is now promoting, by every means possible, from grammar school running through university levels, including national media, the idea that, actually, America is rotten to the core, and has been from the start. We subjugated native peoples when we arrived here, trashed their “advanced” civilizations, raped their women, enslaved their men and remain slavers whether we know it or not, holding millions of fellow Americans hostage to some “ism” or other. We have caused trouble for the entire globe by engaging in unnecessary wars, bullying the world while busily ruining the earth. Because of such sins against humanity, statues of our national heroes must now come down, accompanied with deep humiliation and repentance for erecting them in the first place. Some are even clamoring (anarchists never “suggest”) for a new constitution “more amenable to a civilized people.”
Within a single lifetime, we have moved, in the view of the liberal left, from admiration to apology to ashamed. Honored to ho-hum to horrible. One wonders about the next permutation, given that shocking descent.
My counsel?
1. Hang on for the ride!
2. Roller-coasters are always loud; expect even angrier vitriol suggesting evermore idiotic “solutions.”
3. Understand that our challenges are more lethal than ever. Western civilization has never seen anything remotely comparable to the nuclear factor. All comparisons are off the table.
4. STICK TO YOUR OWN KNITTING! That’s what my Mom often told me as a teenager.
It was an entire philosophy, and wise as well, in a sound-byte: do your best to live an orderly life no matter what is happening around you. I was to read much later, “Every life is equidistant to eternity.” Among other things, that means your single life bears eternal significance and because your culture turns rotten is no reason why you should.
That is not a plea for non-engagement in the culture. Shout back at the huns. Outlive and outlove and out-think them. Even if they own your body, don’t give them your soul. In the meantime, take care of your own little civilization—your own life, your family, your church, your neighbors, your town.
Before you go, ponder this, for all of our admitted cultural fatuities, faults, and failings, does it not occur puzzling to you that most of the world’s people want, desperately, to live here? What do they know that we don’t? If you have traveled the world, you know the answer to that question.
Bill Anderson
Grapevine, Texas