A deep darkness is descending over the United States. We are going to
need saints and heroes to courageously stand up to the malevolence that
is spreading - we're going to need people much better than my weak self.
I'm not a Christian, but I lament that the light of Christ is dimming
precipitously in the States.
The family, the root of a healthy
society, is under attack. The absurdity that is gay marriage has been
codified into law. Divorce rates have rocketed above fifty percent. Tens of
millions of our young people are under the sway of violent and filthy
rap and hip hop music. We have reverted back to pagan gladiatorial games
(e.g. UFC) where people bloody and bash each others' heads for money,
fame, and the captivation of a depraved audience. Hormones are being
pumped into sex-confused kids in what can only be described as a futile
and diabolical rebellion against nature and reality. People are being
harassed, mocked and attacked for not insanely referring to singular
individuals with "they/them" pronouns. Academics moving against the
current can no longer speak freely without significant reprisal.
Grifters have largely succeeded in reinvigorating once-dormant racial
tensions. Demonization of the other side is now the modus operandi of
politicians on both sides. Our mainstream news outlets have been generally exposed as
unreliable propaganda outlets at best, and state pravda at worst. The
state's tentacles are intruding into spheres once thought by Americans
to be sacred and one's own. Mental illness and suicidal idealization have
probably reached rates never before seen in America's history. It seems like every week some mentally disturbed individual shoots up random people at a local church, store, or school. We are in the midst of an opiod epidemic; and one state has already legalized meth and cocaine
use - a moral monstrosity which would have been unthinkable even a few
years ago. The gap between the rich and the poor is growing larger, with our wealthiest obscenely worth in the hundreds of billions. The
authoritarian and orwellian Chinese wolf is prowling ever closer and may
well overtake us as the world's superpower soon. Inflation is out of
control...The list goes on.
But the biggest problem of all facing America -- the root problem, if you will -- is the same one that Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's elders spoke of as the reason for Russia's twentieth-century calamities: “Men have forgotten
God; that’s why all this has happened.” [1] We Americans have forgotten God. We as a nation have lost the sense of the transcendent,
and have devolved into a sensuous people bereft of a grander compass
with which to steer our lives.
It is in such times of ever
encroaching evil that we need saints, bodhisattvas and alter Christuses
to emerge from the shards of a nation in its death throes, not only to
help cure the ails of the present order, but to rekindle in the American
heart the sense of a divine transcendence, a divine transcendence which
alone can infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. I do not, or
rather, try not, to despair because I believe in this transcendent
Logos. So I can rationally hope, along with Tolkien, that "From the
ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring."
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[1] Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. “Men Have Forgotten God" (Speech, 1983), National Review. https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/12/aleksandr-solzhenitsyn-men-have-forgotten-god-speech/. The following words are particularly powerful: "More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution; in the process I have read hundreds of books, collected hundreds of personal testimonies, and have already contributed eight volumes of my own toward the effort of clearing away the rubble left by that upheaval. But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
[2] The above image is taken from https://bigthink.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/origin-174.jpg?w=640, and I claim no rights to the image; it is copyrighted to its owner.
