Much is made of “division” in the United States. “Left” and “Right” are “far apart” on the “issues.” Congress is “hopelessly” divided, “races” are divided, the “middle class” is being destroyed. What is going on?
How has the America of World War II, of Eisenhower and J. F.K., Moon landings and even of 9-11, turned into a multi-cultural, deeply indebted nation that seems no longer to have common purpose or even common vision? The only nation launched on the distillation of ideas, philosophies and experiences about FREEDOM – freedom for individuals – has entered into an era of division, disagreement and hatred for opposing opinions and for those holding them. How did we get here? Why haven’t we arrived somewhere else… someplace where our better natures, better educations, better communications and greater technical opportunities would make us more unified, stronger, more capable and even more equally prosperous – free-er, one might have hoped?
There have to have been forces, perhaps “efforts” applied to divert the hope of generations, indeed to divert the “hope” of the “free” world– the dream of the not-free world – into a path of division and hatreds, a path of ultimate destruction and dissolution. What “forces?” It should be no surprise that the strongest forces applied against America’s future come from inside our borders. As always,there are and have been competitors, opponents and enemies from outside. How we have dealt and deal with all of them,comes from inside.
Have there been “outside” forces in our favor? One might count France among those, without whose assistance the bloody divorce from England’s monarchy would have failed in 1783. In an odd, sad way, The French revolution also instructed our fledgling nation as to the excesses to avoid in search of ephemeral purity. In a sense we owe much to both France and to England for the philosophical bases of America. Their joint challenges of World War I caused “America” to repay our debts, most specifically to France when General Pershing”s chief administrative aide, Colonel Charles Stanton, declared to France, and to the World in a sense, “Lafayette, we are here.” And America, having won the great internal battle for its soul in the 1860’s, had clearly grown to national adulthood,ready to play its part in establishing order and correcting injustice.
Although the influences of socialism had begun inserting themselves after the Civil War, it was our new international position during the first world war that enabled statist, Woodrow Wilson, to attempt to replace America’s national independence with a new global partnership, the League of Nations, including, he hoped, conforming our independence to that new order… such is the overarching dream of the strongest “outside” forces against American independence and survival.
To begin the process of bringing America down from its skyrocketing growth and influence, required financial brakes. The first Federal Reserve tryout resulted in the Great Depression and the installation of a social engineering president,FDR, and the great socialist program, Social Security. And, it began the new education of Americans, whose economic fears subsumed the promises of freedom and the duties of responsibility and even the lessons of the Bible. Dependence upon government taxing authority could be suddenly, slyly defined as the new INDEPENDENCE: a remarkable accomplishment over the span of just 11 years. These were inside forces, infinitely more powerful than the outside forces that encouraged and encourages them still.
World War II briefly delayed the socialist wave, even as communists embedded in the federal government prepared Americans for wholehearted embrace of the United Nations as the well-fertilized seedling of a “new world order.” Deeply flawed Joe McCarthy flared brightly as he exposed a number of communists in and near the State and Defense Departments… so did Congressman, Richard Nixon. In the 1960’s society and government were transformed. Government by the Great Society and the 3 assassinations; society by drugs, sex and rock-and-roll, but I repeat myself. Mixed among these social assaults upon morality were the retirements of the great educators – educators who taught more in high school than students learn in college it seems, today. Education became liberal and within the decade, socialist.
The Vietnam war, controlled in large part by the U. N., destroyed the nation’s trust in the rightness and righteousness of government. We were killing soldiers stupidly, without a goal or plan for victory. The hope of the world was dimmed, its trustworthiness diminished. Despite winning virtually every battle in Vietnam, The U. S. conceded defeat and crawled home ashamed. A process of military stalemate, begun in Korea, multiplied in Vietnam, has persisted to the current time, fulfilling the socialist lie that no nation is any better than any other, no culture is exceptional, no social structure is superior. September 11, 2001 came and… well, went, its lessons unlearned and turned against ourselves.
Government can no longer do enough. A president who believed the Constitution is fatally flawed with its “negative rights,” was elected and re-elected. Inside forces. Generations, now, believe that a Constitution without socialism is not worth defending and they don’t even see the dichotomy. Inside forces.
Now education is likely the most potent inside force that pushes and molds our supposedly self-governing citizens. Given the remarkable resources developed inside the United States, one might think that the education of American citizens would be wholly according to our own heritage and culture, yet we are turning out American youth who’ve been taught that every other culture on Earth is equal to or better than our own, and that our heritage and history is so flawed as to be indefensible. No history-changing, indeed, history-improving ideas about freedom and self-governance and governmental constraints, can be allowed credence any longer because actions taken by the respective thinkers 250 , 300 and 500 years ago, are disapproved-of in the 21st century.
One is stressed to imagine a greater waste of time or greater loss of opportunity. Instead of leading today’s students – inheritors of the exceptionalism of America’s founding – to grasp and then build upon, improve upon, the phenomenal break with history that our Constitution represented and represents, its lessons are rejected in favor, unbelievably, of socialism,and denigrated in preference for division and hatred. Is this accidental? Is the inexorably leftward, anti-constitutional drift of U. S. education all happenstance? Is it reasonable for a purposeful society to maintain some control over the imparting of culture to its youth? Or shall the freedoms we enjoy be defended only in terms of their allowance for the undermining of the foundations of that society?
Inside forces. Beware of wolves in sheep’s clothing.