The run of the mobs in our cities and campuses has made this July 4th more significant than any other of recent vintage. These hordes are more intent on a disfigurement of our historical memory in the pursuit of horrifying goals, whose dastardliness they are so unaware. For the rest of us, please celebrate the birth of our country, and if you need a boost for those mystic chords that lie deep in the hearts of most Americans, here’s Madison Rising and their rendition of The Star Spangled Banner.
Perhaps we need to be reminded of all the blessings that God has bestowed on us as Americans. Sadly, for others among the young in particular, their mystic chords have gone missing. It’s as if a pedophile has shanghaied the trajectory of their life story and an alternative and scary meaning implanted. A youth’s attachment to the country of their birth has been co-opted by a tale of unrelenting torment. They are primed to be the shock troops of a new and sickening revolution.
It begins with a blanket condemnation of anyone not like them, or not in full agreement with their vision. Easy targets are those no longer living. They can’t fight back. Stalin had his government ministries constantly manufacture a past to fit his preferences. For today’s version of Stalin’s Young Pioneers (communist youth), their targets are most conspicuously the DWM’s – Dead White Males, formerly known as the Founders. All of their storied contributions are mangled to fit an indoctrination that could be traced to such screeds as NYT’s “The 1619 Project”, the foolishness of Howard Zinn, and the mental trash that came off the pen of John Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, and Antonio Gramsci. Too young and ill-informed to question the rubbish, they deface our great leaders and seek to impose their warped version of reality on the rest of us, and thereby destroy our country. It’s totalitarianism on the march.
George Orwell had it right when he wrote, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
You see, following their ill-logic, nothing and no-one can be honored. The fact is, all of us are flawed, and have been so since creation. If a person, past or present, isn’t an exact mirror image of the activists’ beau ideal, statues are torn down at the same time as curriculums are mutilated to match the new zeitgeist.
But the same holds true for their heroes. Marx was a bloodthirsty and despicable human being, and not much of a loving husband and father. The people that ran the publishing empire that gave us “The 1619 Project” also managed a pipeline for pro-Stalin propaganda in the news feeds of Walter Duranty. Duranty helped to hide the crimes of one of history’s greatest monsters. Martin Luther King probably had a personal history of extra-marital affairs. But MLK stepped up to lead an end to a vile wrong. We are a collection of mixed bags. I could go on.
People don’t live lives of unalloyed virtue from cradle to grave. And things change on us. Some notions that were once considered reasonable and proper are no longer seen in the same light. Notions of racial superiority was once as natural to popular wisdom as the 4 humors of Galen’s writings or the earth-centered universe of Ptolemy. Racial separation for the purpose of social harmony was at one time an acceptable view in polite conversation. Thank God that we outgrew them. But those people, like us, were a product of their time. To condemn them for not having read Marcuse and Howard Zinn, or to have benefited from the musings of Antifa thugs, is the height of folly.
And remember, you, the young, are setting yourselves up for defacement as a new worldview grips a another future’s young. Maybe, just maybe, you will be considered as despicable as you hold Thomas Jefferson. Don’t be so confidant in your self-righteousness.
Sen. John Stennis (D, Miss.) was a committed segregationist but would later come around to campaign for Mike Espy to be the first black congressman to be elected from the Old South since Reconstruction. Abraham Lincoln pondered what to do with the freed slaves at a time when the “peculiar institution” was a going concern in 15 of 32 states. He quickly dropped the idea and would later lead the nation in a war to end slavery at a cost of 2% of the population dead on the battle field, issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and got the passage of the 13th Amendment. Not a bad record, and one far more significant than idle musings. The same holds true for all our real heroes. They may have subscribed to some popular and faulty ideas, and possessed flaws like all of us, but their virtues far outweighed the weaknesses of being human.
Judgments are a weighing in the balance. There may be a number of righteous acts, or just a single big one, to compensate for the wrongs. That’s the reality of a world filled with flawed human beings. James Madison was right when he opined that people are not angels. It’s a lesson that our young snowflakes would do well to consider.
For the rest of us, don’t let them spoil our joyous July 4th.
RogerG