A Few Good Men: Defeating Dishonesty in America
Did you know that about as many people identify as not having any religious affiliation as identify as being Evangelical? It really isn’t that surprising. I suspect that even a whole bunch of people who identify as Evangelical or even as Christian do not practice what they preach. Consider the following:
We Americans, as we like to call ourselves, elected a known liar, womanizer, tax-cheat and general loser as our president. That POS is still trying to claim his failed presidency. We allowed Moscow Mitch who lies about anything and everything to stay in power, too, to withhold Merrick Garland’s name from consideration for the Supreme Court. We did allow three liars to be appointed to the same court. Now how is any of that Christian? The short answer is that it just is not.
We want everyone to carry guns around like we still live in the Wild West. But we allow people in churches and synagogues to be murdered with those same guns while we lie about how the reason for having the guns is actually self defense. It isn’t self defense to take a gun into a house of worship and murder people you don’t agree with. We allow innocent children to be murdered in their class rooms while police stand outside the classroom door and ignore the carnage taking place three inches away on the other side.
We deny that facts are facts. We condone alternate realities. There is only one reality which we all share. It may have many aspects and permutations but it is still just this one reality and one universe in which we three dimensional critters all live in. We elect people to Congress and to the Senate of the United States who advocate violence in the name of “rights.” We treat hypocrisy as news and give the lie of hypocrisy the same weight as actual reality. In other words, we are a nation of liars. We lie to ourselves so we look the other way when we see our national leaders engaged in lying, the same way we ignore our own untruthfulness. We blame other people for our misfortunes and refuse to acknowledge that we do those things to ourselves by trying to deny our own responsibility.
We place our interactions with other people in our “I’m right, you’re wrong” and “I’m good and you’re bad” boxes. None of which is actually true, but we refuse to acknowledge the truth about how our righteousness is merely self-generated fantasy. We can not attain wisdom or actual thought. We opt instead for drug visions of sugary ideas we call thinking and we are particularly fond of drug-induced ultimatums concerning who and what we are. We never check to see if what we have decided is actually true. We claim truth because we declare an issue to be true. Not ever because we know.
When it comes to issues concerning our nature as spiritual entities, we can’t even consider the obvious. We live because of an unseen and probably unseeable force. When that force leaves our bodies we die. The body remains, but the spirit, if I might use that word, leaves us. But we can not possibly admit that spirit has a function that it tries to fulfill through our bodies. We must claim that we decide what we do with our conscious minds. We can’t explain why we do the things we do, but we still claim conscious control of the behavior we learned as very young children. Especially our religious and other beliefs. Who would possibly claim that they are a Democrat or a Republican because they learned that set of values before they went to preschool? Why would we? We all know that we decide on those issues consciously in our early adulthood. If only that were true.
Our internal and external realities just do not match. We know that but we deny it steadfastly. We deny that we are a self-centered society. We claim to be #1 in the world but reality does not support such a self-generated belief. There is very little in the world in which we can claim 1st place. Well, there is gun violence. And there is also mass murder. We’re number one in those categories. But can we admit that? Heavens no, we lie to ourselves about that and claim the lie as righteousness. To the rest of the world we do not appear to be all that sane, folks. Really, we do not appear to be sane at all.
What is actually real is that Americans live in a fantasy world. A world of T.V. drama, T.V. reality and game shows. We live in Disney World. We live on Magic Mountain. We live in Hollywood or Dollywood or New York City or, worst of all, in Washington DC. It appears that the tide of American society being substantive, is waning. This is not the first time the tide of substance has waned. It is doubtful that it is the last time. It will wax again, but as always that incoming tide depends on good men standing for that which is true and trustworthy. In the hearing over the past week or so we’ve all witnessed that even under the Eye of Mordor good men stood tall and protected us all. That can not be ignored.
During World War II there was a song that went, “give me 10 men who are stout-hearted men and I’ll soon give you 10,000 more.” Those words have never been more important than they are today. Dishonest and disingenuous men are trying to turn back the clock on progress that has taken a lifetime to accomplish. That can not take place. Those men are destined to failure. Americans are often complacent and even apathetic, but Americans are never heartless. If there is a national characteristic it is that Americans have heart. We have all suffered injury at the hands of the world and have overcome those injuries to make a stronger and more unified society. Maybe it’s because we Americans all know if we work together we can accomplish anything. Maybe it’s because there are always good men who answer some call within themselves to right the ship of state. Whatever the reason, Americans have always moved into the future by learning from past mistakes. I just do not see how overturning Roe vs Wade is moving into the better future. It might be moving into a remembered past, but not into an unknown future. Those people who are trying so desperately to return to yesteryear are not lone rangers, no matter what they may think. That bunch of yahoos represent Nixon-era political thinking. Without a doubt they’re all complaining about the kids of today. The only difference is that the kids of today have TikTok instead of MTV or American Bandstand. These young people are not hippies, and they’re not so naive as to say silly things like “make love, not war”, but they are savvy and know what works and what doesn’t. And the kind of crap that current politicians in Texas and Florida are slinging about and the kind of religious and not lawful judgements the court is trying to make us all live by, will not stand. The political pendulum swings one way, then the other. Check with the French Revolution or the Pinochet Regime or the Vietnam fiasco. Or any number of other totalitarian attempts throughout all of history. They have all failed. This conservative totalitarianism will also wither on the vine. Therefore, the midterm elections are the democrat’s to lose.
