America’s long goodbye

America, like the Christian West, is dying from sustained and relentless suicide.  Having accepted that our heritage is the sole cause of sin and evil in the world, a growing number of generationals are concluding that no matter what woes may beset the world, it would be better off without the pesky Christian West, especially America.  It’s not a Left thing, though the enlightenment inspired revolutionary nature of the Left utilizes the old tactic of declaring as entirely evil the thing to be rebelled against.  But even many who aren’t on the Left are seeming to shrug their shoulders and say ‘it’s dumb, evil, good riddance.’  You can’t sustain a civilization that nobody wants to sustain.

Of course the reasons why some are dismissing the heritage of the West is because of that Woodstock era tendency of declaring everything to suck, while insisting it’s everyone else’s fault.  In our polemical age, it’s also easily done by just pointing to those other types and saying it’s because of them.  Or they were the problem.  Or whatever.  In the Catholic world, where fealty to Church should trump fealty to state, it’s all the easier to start dismissing anything of value in our nation’s past.

So Thomas McDonald, and then Mark Shea, both paused and said ‘gee, perhaps that stenographer that had a meltdown wasn’t just someone with a mental case.  You never know.  Maybe, just maybe mind you, it could have been God speaking.’ 

Really?  The whole ‘we’ve never been a nation under God, we are a vast conspiracy of Free Masons, we are a nation of evil’?  That could be God talking?   Even to consider the possibility means it’s a possibility you’re willing to consider.  If that same woman had said the same about, say, the Catholic Church, would they have posted it under the title ‘you never know, could be God talking’?  To do that means you have to be willing to accept the premise.

While I would never, ever say that America and the Kingdom of God are one and the same, I also don’t think it was all that bad.  Certainly no worse than any other kingdom, nation or civilization in history.  And yet two individuals who are not radical leftists nonetheless have come to the point of even entertaining the idea that this old country, to which who fewer and fewer people proudly pledge allegiance, was corrupted and wicked from the get go.  Whether for secular or religious reasons, we never should have cared in the first place.

That’s a bad sign.  When individuals conclude their lives are worthless, have always been worthless, and there is nothing redeeming in their entire past after all, that’s when you kick into high gear.  From a counseling perspective, that’s when you make sure serious measures are taken to help, because it can end horribly.  When a nation concludes that there was never anything worthwhile after all, and it was all pretty bad from the beginning, it is on suicide alert.  Those who could do something simply don’t care to.  And those who wish to do something to exploit it will succeed.