America appears to be close to electing as President a man about whom we know little and the little we know, Rev. Wright, Bill Ayers, ACORN, is disturbing. How have we come to this point?
For most of its existence, America knew who it was and for what it stood.
We knew it because we studied our shared history, our founding fathers and the enduring documents they produced which served as the guiding principles of our Republic.
But beginning in the 1960s, we started down a new path called deconstruction. Everything we knew about our Country, we were told, was wrong. The singular, overarching fact about the Founders was not their wisdom, courage or patriotism, but that many of them were slave owners. Judging them by the mores of today rather than those of their own time, this fact was deemed to make irrelevant, indeed, delegitimatize, their virtues and contributions.
American history class became little more than an immersion in the sins of our past. Slavery, Manifest Destiny’s devastation of the American Indians, Hiroshima, these came to define America. The bold idealism of The American Revolution, the price paid for abolition in The Civil War, the blood and treasure spent to defeat aggression and totalitarianism in two World Wars, the spread of American-style freedom and democracy around the world, these are underemphasized at best, distorted at worst.
Then there came the undermining of, among some communities the utter destruction of, the American family by well-intentioned, but, alas, misguided welfare expansion. And, finally, the driving of religion from our schools and other civic institutions.
This deconstruction has left many Americans, especially amongst the young, without a sense of who they are and what America stands for. We Americans are no longer unified by a shared belief in the goodness of our heritage and the soundness of our institutions. Nature abhors a vacuum. That void gets filled by the ideas and images we are inundated with every day, glamour, celebrity, sexiness.
Without a solid framework provided by a proud history, valued traditions and beliefs, it is not surprising that many judge a candidate by the cheap, ephemeral coin of the day.
1 comment:
Lou ~
I remember a few years ago asking a kid that was hired at my place of work what they were teaching in History class these days (he was just out of high school). More specifically, I asked him about WWII.
His response was that WWII, as he understood it, basically would not have been so devastating had the US not ignored the pleas of the world and gotten involved earlier. Thusly the US "allowed" Pearl Harbor to happen so that we could ramp up jobs/industry to pull us out of the great depression.
There was something about D-Day but he didn't remember what that was.
Finally, there was the bombing of [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] which was the US showing the world that we would be the new bullies on the block with the biggest stick, and that we also used it because we really didn't have the stomach for war and wanted to end it.
This came up around the 60th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor, and I had asked what he was taught about it in U.S. History.
What a bummer.
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