She said:
I have this horrible feeling in the pit of my stomach that things are going to start changing our way of life as we know it in the U.S. :-(
Unfortunately for her, I replied with my musings, which follow:
It's been changing for a long time. It's just that now the stage is set for all of the "foundational" changes that have been made since the New Deal in the 1930's for practically anyone to build anything they want on top of it and call it America. Moral relativity and subjective reality have wormed their way throughout our "culture", or what is left of it.
There has been an all-out assault on American Culture, and I'm not sure exactly when it started. Sometime right after WWII is when it seemed to start taking a foothold. There is a strong disdain for American Culture as it was before and probably during WWII, and it is widely held by the people who teach our children and by the people who bring us the nightly news. Each generation it gets amplified that much more. I have really come to sympathize with those who home-school.
Multicultural, anti-Christian-ism (which is kind of weird because... wouldn't "multi-culture" include Christian culture? -- well, you'd think) has, in effect, destroyed any cohesive culture America had, and it has pitted America against itself. This will be the downfall of America. I used to think I wouldn't see it in my lifetime, but if we don't wake up and try to reverse some of the damage, I almost certainly will.
We spotlight what Hollywood and Music celebrities "think" about politics (aren't we paying them to act and sing?). Any conservative thought is dismissed as "extremist", or "hard line".
Liberals like soft lines. They can smudge them and MoveOn.Org them around to suit their liking.
Don't get me wrong. We do need liberals in society. But they shouldn't be in positions of authority. Authority requires structure. But we do need to have that structure tested and questioned to continue to make sure that it makes sense. Still, unbridled liberalism as a life philosophy leads nowhere.
Your children will be taught that humans are basically a "cancer" on the earth, that all we do is cause "damage". That somehow all of the worlds' problems boil down to something America did, driven by greedy capitalists. That whenever an environmental anomaly crops up, we must first assume it was human-caused.
Outside of a Christian school, they will be taught that Christianity is bad, and everything else is good. That Whites of European descent are a bunch of overprivileged, racist meanies, and that anything they don't like in their lives can be blamed on someone else.
This has got to stop.
Right now, in the voting public we have reached the 50-50 point. 50% want to go the way of Green Socialism, and 50% believe in a Jeffersonian Democracy, with the Constitution and the Bill of Rights at its core. Something is going to give soon. The conservatives are starting to put up a fight, but it may be to little, too late.
People don't seem to remember. Stalin was a socialist. Hitler was a socialist. Mussolini was a socialist. Castro is a socialist. Milosevic was a socialist. Socialists prey on political unrest. (So do Islamists, for that matter). More innocent civilians have been killed in the name of socialism in this century alone than any other cause.
Physically, New Orleans is an example of what happens when people don't take charge of their own destinies. We have know for decades that a direct hit by a major hurricane on New Orleans would be disastrous. 80% of the city is below sea level, and it's surrounded by a very large lake (which is a little above sea level), the Mississippi River (which is a little above sea level) and 80 miles of basically sea-level plain between it and the sea itself. In short, if you live there, you'd better have a plan to get out when there's a hurricane coming. You'd better be talking about how you're going to build bigger, stronger levies, and how you're going to protect your pump system from the elements -- and what's the feasibility of putting your house on stilts.
But people kept expecting the government to do something for them. Everyone living in New Orleans is taking a tremendous risk, and anybody who doesn't know that has their head in the slowly sinking Mississippi River silt.
What you're seeing socially in New Orleans right now -- the bad stuff anyway -- is what happens when a society loses its moral foundations and people are allowed to rationalize why its ok to steal, burn, break, even kill -- because after all, they're all VICTIMS so it's ok! It's understandable.
Our whole "Separation of Church and State" thing is a good thing that has been turned in on itself. Our founding fathers never meant for us to have a Godless state, and certainly not an Anti-God state (which we're becoming). They wouldn't have used the phrase "... endowed by our creator" in the Declaration of Independence, or "In God We Trust" as a motto on our money.
They did a fabulous job with the Constitution. However, they did it in the non-vaccuum of a philosophy which was heavily Christian influenced. I don't think they ever foresaw a day when Christian values themselves would be questioned merely for being Christian ones.
They wrote (this is the actual text of the First Amendment to the US Constitution):
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances..
That "prohibiting" part is seldom quoted, and the establishment clause is paraphrased and re-interpreted. An Establishment is an Institution. Christianity isn't an institution. The Catholic Church is. The Methodist Church is. Religion is not an Establisment. A restaurant is an Establishment of Food and Drink. There are Establishments of Religion -- but religion in and of itself was not what they were getting at. What they were trying to avoid with these two phrases was 1) an ESTABLISHMENT of Religion calling the shots for the State, or 2) the State telling us which Establishments of Religion were ok to follow. In other words, no Taliban. No Ayatollas. No emperor Dieties (Japan). No Bishops of Canterbury.
People wig when Bush says he believes in God, and that he believes he is doing God's will. I'm not a religious person, but I understand religion and I take that as a GOOD thing. If you believe in God, you sure as hell OUGHT to be doing his will. People who criticize him for this are blatantly anti-Christian.
I like the following line from a Gordon Lightfoot song:
"I've seen the high rollers come and go, ItÂ?s the holy rollers I trust "
There's some truth to that (and of course there are exceptions as well).
Bottom line is that Western Culture, which has been heavily influenced by Christianity over the last 1,500 years or so, has a split personality, and half of that personality wants to vanquish the religion inherent in it, and unfortunately for Christians that religion is pretty much Christian. They're not so worried about the pagans or the Muslims or Indian religions or Eastern religions.
The problem is, you really can't separate the two without destroying the whole thing. The West laments the Taliban blowing up religious artifacts of Hindus and Buddhists, but the West's liberal intellectuals would probably quietly applaud the same thing happening to Christian monuments in this country.
I'm for a return to a sane interpretation of the Constitution rather than scrapping that great document and replacing it with yet another attempt at a Marxist Utopia.
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