On this day of giving thanks to God for our many blessings, John Derbyshire reminds us all to include a line item for this unique time and place in history we are all inhabiting:
The sum total of those reflections is that I have been living in a golden age that will soon end. Born between VE Day and VJ Day, I missed all the greatest horrors of the 20th century. If granted a normal lifespan, I shall miss the horrors of the 21st, too. If my parents' generation was the greatest, mine has been the luckiest. For that, in this Thanksgiving season, I give sincere and heartfelt thanks.
Amen. We children of Western Civilization in the mid- to late 20th century have been able to eschew the companions nearly all other human beings have had to endure throughout the ages. War, poverty, sickness, mass death, and the stone cold fear that shrouds them all. The absence of these conditions in our lives and the individual liberty that allows us to control the outcomes of our existences blinds us to the reality that the civilization we've enjoyed is not a result of predestination.
For our lives right now, we should all be profoundly grateful to God and to the generations previous who had to suffer and struggle to make it possible.
And we need to remember, this civilization is not guaranteed to us in the future. We are an historical anomaly. We are living at the summit of a centuries-long, uphill, violent struggle for truth and freedom. And that summit is precarious and subject to the constant gales of base human nature and to nature itself. Derbyshire, ever the fatalist (though a chipper one at that), recounts some of the forces conspiring to expel us into ascent, back to the the terrible constants of history.
Nuclear weapons, throughout my lifetime kept safe under guard in just a handful of reasonably well-ordered nations, will be traded for cash in third-world bazaars and smuggled into American cities ready for the day of judgment. (Perhaps they already have been.) Clever new viruses will mutate, escape from labs, or be released...
Perhaps the greatest threat is the one we pose to ourselves, in our decadence, short-sightedness, and ignorance of history:
Enterprise is being choked off by the Iron Triangle of taxation, regulation, and litigation. France's present, of which we have heard so much comment recently, is our future. Government is hopelessly broken. Though far larger now than in 1957, it does less, and it does that less very badly. Its most elementary functions -- defending our borders, keeping a thrifty eye on the national wealth, apprising us of what our enemies are up to -- are no longer performed to any effect.
And the roots of what we do to aid and abet our governmental self-destruction is based on what we are taught:
The concept that lay beneath and supported our collective consciousness until recently, the concept that white Europeans, their civilization and their bourgeois culture, were the apex of human achievement, will have been shamed, mocked, and badgered out of existence -- along, of course, with that civilization and that culture.
I reflect on the modern Left and their actions, denigrating our traditions and culture at every opportunity. Embracing and aggressively pushing the public policies that weaken our resolve and belief in our own abilities to achieve and overcome the inevitable challenges that will confront us. Their efforts all seem to have the object of sapping the vitality of the golden civilization we've inherited and inhibiting our ability to resist the common causes that have brought down civilizations throughout time.
It is depressing and a tragic process. It's ending assumed by even such smart and prescient observers like Derbyshire. I'm not at that point of resignation, yet. And I think my interest in politics (and it's practical application - blogging) and my electoral support of Republicans is, more than anything else, an attempt to resist this process. And for those who are engaged in defending and trying to preserve our civilization (you know who you are), for you I am thankful as well.
In other words, Happy Turkey Day, you mugs!
No comments:
Post a Comment