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No, You Can’t Have My Country

You can’t have my country. You cannot take away anything that makes her her. She has stood proudly head and shoulders above others ever since her brilliant, bombastic founding. She has withstood fire and assault and wars and ravages. Her people have shed blood for her.

America is under a dreadful assault. The most dangerous threat to her liberties is not from an external bellicose country, but from the war chants echoing from within. If social media is any indication of the flavor of the country—and I believe it is—we are in turmoil.

We are angry. We no longer know or remember how to have reasonable political conversation. We are losing friends and family members. At the slightest provocation, we are up in arms, calling one another names and blocking one another from sharing our lives with the push of a button. It is shameful and it leaves many of us in despair as we stare bleakly into the future, wondering how much worse all this can get.

Many of us grew up admiring the heroes of the past: men and women who bravely and willingly placed their lives on the line for principles; brilliant minds forming the very ideas that began an infant republic; thoughtful words both written and spoken, crystallizing our own thoughts and placing them on firmer ground. Even America’s monuments are a testament to such greatness of thought, word, and deed (proudly promising such things as: “Nor shall your glory be forgot/While fame her records keeps”). We were taught to respect such things at school and at home, in public, and in the church pews where we sat every week.

America has undergone a seismic shift from those days. Her heart has quaked, and as it shook, doubt took root. School textbooks are rewritten such that truth of our history is no longer recognizable. History teachers who are guilty of ignorance or malfeasance, or both, feed these untruths to America’s young. Parents too busy to train young minds give away the grave responsibility of raising their children to others. Fathers, who used to reinforce critical thinking skills, are markedly absent from the lives of many. Our young are taught that truth is variable and not objective, that higher standards do not become goals with which to shape a life.

The politically correct culture of fake news and “thou shalt nots” insisted upon by the Left are further exacerbating these problems. David Gelernter wrote:

Political correctness is the biggest issue facing America today . . . The ironic name disguises the real nature of this force, which ought to be called invasive leftism or thought-police liberalism or metastasized progressivism. The old-time American mainstream, working- and middle-class white males and their families, is mad as hell about political correctness and the havoc it has wreaked for 40 years—havoc made worse by the flat refusal of most serious Republicans to confront it.”

It would appear that their intentional plan is working, that as each day the issues raised by them become more outrageous and egregious, we accept the fact that yesterday’s issues are now too sensitive to discuss in public or on our Facebook pages or even in our families.

Rush Limbaugh, elaborating on this idea, recently observed the media “can repeat what they know are falsehoods. They can repeat supposed intelligence that is not intelligence. They can create an entirely phony narrative and follow it for a week and nobody’s allowed to criticize that. You turn the criticism around on them and they can’t handle it. They can’t even handle being laughed at, much less being seriously criticized.”

A political culture that undermines the freedom to openly and reasonably discuss ideas is dismantling much that makes America great. As the public becomes unable or unwilling to raise non-P.C. issues, the stench of the oppressed slips under the door of America’s hallowed institutions: her schools.

Public institutions (and private are following so quickly they are tripping on their own feet trying to keep up) have become purveyors of lies and groupthink. They are downsizing facts, knowledge, and critical skills and are increasing useless and harmful information (for example, the expansion of sex education and Common Core standards for math that are as indecipherable to those hired to teach it as they are to those trying to assimilate it). Students who balk at the ideas or methodology are punished in a number of ways. Commenting on this trend, Glenn Reynolds says: “Of course, by limiting what people can say and think, political correctness has hollowed out America’s universities, cheapened and distorted its politics and served to make those who favor traditional American values like free speech feel marginalized and at risk.”

America’s future is her young—that statement seems to be self-evident, to the point of cliché. The change, then, that may bring America back to some semblance of her former glory is to rear children who know how to think critically, who live thoughtful lives with their minds set on higher standards, knowing Truth and not shrinking from its audacious claims on their lives and thinking. Our children need to know how to be good neighbors, they need to be familiar with the peaceful resolution of conflicts, they need to know facts and figures and dates and philosophies and books and beauty. The responsibility for this assortment of needs does not lie within our schools, it lies with us, the mothers and fathers of our future.

America needs Americans standing up and loudly proclaiming: no you will not be allowed to take away my speech, my guns, my children, my money, my right to make a life for myself. You will not be allowed to continue this charade of so-called “progressivism.” You must be stopped. You must be stopped because we desperately need hope, the hope of an America reborn.

To give the gift of a hopeful future, it is imperative that we plant, water, and feed the seeds of that hope within them, and we must do it quickly and with great urgency.

Photo credit: iStock/Getty Images

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