As the calendar rolls over from the last days of the old year to the first ones of the New Year 2019, predictions are popular. So are Out-In Lists, sometimes funny, sometimes serious, that by juxtaposition contrast the new year’s fads, fables and facts—usually expressed in only a word or two—with last year’s equally cryptic bygone counterparts.
My own list is a series of lamentations, some cryptic and some not so much, about the good things that are rapidly disappearing from our lives and the bad things that are continuing to displace them in 2019 and perhaps forever thereafter.
Sorrowfully, our country, our culture, our Constitution and mankind’s universal immortal soul is perhaps in greater danger now than at any time since that “dastardly attack” in 1941. At that time, “America’s Greatest Generation” stepped forward to save us. Who and where are their counterparts today?
Somewhere along the line in recent decades, perhaps when Bill Clinton pointed his finger at us all and said, “I did not have sex with that woman,” the ruling class, with the help of its media arm at the Washington Post and New York Times, sealed the bargain with the Devil. Thus began the steady decline in competence, integrity, decency, and normal human and family behavior that will leave us as a nation, a culture, and individual people unable and unwilling either to defend or reproduce ourselves.
The consequences of such self-destructiveness have long been known and recorded in sacred antiquities.
Lamentations 1:7 (NIV) tells us:
Jerusalem remembered in the days of her affliction
and of her miseries all her pleasant things that she had in the days of old,
when her people fell into the hand of the enemy, and none did help her:
the adversaries saw her, and did mock at her sabbaths.
So it was. So it shall be.
Photo Credit: Thomas Cole (1801-1848), The Course of Empire – Consummation, VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images