07/21/2021
FROM GREATNESS TO FAILURE
From the “GREATEST GENERATION” to the Worst Generation in less than one lifetime. Who would have thought it possible; but we actually have well educated, adult Americans, along with their children, embracing what our fathers and mothers and grandfathers and grandmothers fought against in World War II, the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam and the Middle East where we’re still paying the price in lives and treasure.
We’ve embraced fascism, socialism, communism, imperialism ... the greatest evils the world has ever known. The ideologies responsible for more human suffering and death than any others and most Americans are so poorly educated that they don’t even know it.
History will be hard-pressed to understand and explain this monumental tragedy.
Maybe they will find that it wasn’t the Greatest Generation after all but merely just another generation forced, by the deeds of evil men, to do what needed to be done at the time, not even fully understanding the final ramifications of the ideologies they fought. And then, understandably, not wishing for their children the same hell on earth, over-coddled their offspring even instructing them in some of the deceptive and false promises of their enemies’ that sounded good on the surface.
Certainly not to take away from their great sacrifice because my father, my uncles and their friends fought in that damn WW II and some died, but what choice did they have? My own godfather, who I loved and respected dearly, began his earlier adult life in the OSS, parachuting behind enemy lines as a spy and saboteur in Eastern Europe and then made a career of the CIA after the war. He had some socialistic tendencies due to its seductive lies. He and I would argue until we got tired and decided it was time to lay back and drink whiskey. That was then. Never did either of us, in our wildest dreams believe that any of those ideas could be implemented in America even though he retained the hope. This is now. Those very threats, and then some, are openly championed threatening to divide and destabilize our nation.
It all started with the Jews begging Samuel to ask God to appoint for them a king; not trusting in their own abilities to govern themselves with God’s help. God, acquiescing, granted their request because, after all, he had gifted his people with free will so He honored it no matter how foolishly it might manifest itself. God warned them that having a king rather than their freedom would lead to high taxation and servitude. Even so, God’s chosen people were not able to resist the lure of socialistic lies promising to make life easier by removing personal responsibility. After all, if God gave them a king, the king and ultimately God would bear all responsibility, and not individual people or the people as a whole, if circumstances went belly-up.
The rest of the world’s people followed suit instituting totalitarian governments of one form or another until the fledgling United States tried what God had intended. It created a constitution that redirected men to God’s original goal. Now, a mere 230 years later, we’re making a 180. Back to cowardly, pass-the-buck socialism where all errors, all faux-pas, all disasters in judgement are always someone else’s fault…God’s, the nation’s leadership, a political party that’s disagreeable, a disliked institution or organization or corporation or individual man.
Entering the 19th century, we had everything going for us. Freedom, liberty from overbearing government, the ability to achieve whatever we could dream. And what have we done since the Greatest Generation? We’ve done what they never did. We’ve surrendered. We’ve chosen the illusion of safety and the easy life that will inevitably and naturally decompose into slavery and suffering. We’ve even willingly “manufactured our own chains.”