The appalling scenes of defacement of our nation’s identity in the destruction of statues, the frenzies over the renaming of established places, and the jihad to expunge illusory “white supremacy” deserve the level of respect that one should reserve for a child’s temper tantrum.
They are founded on the juvenile desire for everything to conform to their wishes. Right now, these seasoned adolescents demand that the past be shoehorned into their closed-minded sense of social order. As such, they condemn long-dead others for not being them.
The situation gets worse when infant maturity has the endorsement of a major political party, the Democratic Party. What is the Party signing onto? They are adopting a campaign to exterminate the past and institute Pol Pot’s year-zero since olden times can’t be rejiggered to fit the fantasy. People in prior eras didn’t have the “advantage” of expensive, university-trained “wokeness”. It would never occur to our self-righteous founts of ignorance that folks in times past might have a slightly different conception of what constitutes the good society. For the street thug, it matters squat. The intolerance of the youthful-and-ignorant zealot is now part of the Party’s platform.
Like it or not, George Washington can’t be made into an advocate of the belief that a person can think themselves into a different sex. For all of Thomas Jefferson’s forays into revolution, he can’t be made into a neo-Marxist. These national paragons were a product of their time every bit as much as a Black Lives Matter/Antifa street hooligan is a product of theirs. It would never occur to the spoiled hood that people in the past were trying to form the good society too. They just had a few different ideas on how to accomplish it.
For the bulk of people in earlier times, and awkward for us to accept today, they might believe that social peace is best advanced through a separation of the races; or a childrearing that requires the woman to be chained to the home; or a peace and stability that is best achieved in a unity of the secular and religious in a person of hereditary authority; or the ancient notion that slavery is just another possible station in society; etc.
But alongside those notions, we see emerge out of Christianity the equality of all souls and our ideas of morality, justice, rule of law, popular sovereignty, due process, equal protection, etc. The woke malcontent can’t grasp the concept of a developing ethos. For these youths, if it doesn’t align with their prejudices of the here and now, it must be ground down by the wheel of history – the jargon of the 20th century’s worst blood-thirsty totalitarianisms.
Our modern street punks really don’t have a mature sense of what constitutes the good society to present to us other than a desire to manufacture equality everywhere and on everything, real or imagined, and overthrow something vaguely referred to as the “system” or “man”.
These simpletons can’t imagine that many wild excursions into ideological frenzy produce inhuman dead ends. In fact, more misery may result. The French Revolution had its Reign of Terror and descent into despotism. The Bolshevik Revolution from the git-go was a woke exercise in stamping absolute equality on everything, and it gave birth to a 74-year nightmare of gulags, a party and personal dictatorship, bloody purges, a huge army of secret police, show trials, the use of famine for ideological ends, and a generally sordid existence. The same experience is being replicated in today’s Venezuela. Ditto for China. Our young fanatic isn’t aware that he or she might be walking in the footsteps of history’s worst killers and harbingers of misery.
Such a thought is inconceivable to our fired-up juvenile wrapping straps around the neck of Christopher Columbus or the Virgin Mary. They are intolerant of others who can’t be them. Sounds to me like a screaming fit posing as a revolution.
RogerG