My Thoughts
Last evening as I was reviewing my upcoming book Collected Essays: Colloqui Volume II – 2017-2018 I read an essay I wrote almost three years ago. I wish I could say I had been mistaken then but unfortunately, I cannot. The truth is things have deteriorated to the point where what I wrote then reads more an elegiac than eulogy; the former a lament for We the People rather than a final tribute to the people now so divided.
Here is what I wrote on January 5, 2018, just to remind us all of what is at stake.
The de facto motto of the United States was, since its founding, considered to be E Pluribus Unum, “Out of many, one.” In 1956, the U. S. Congress passed H. J. Resolution 396 adopting “In God We Trust” as the official motto of the nation. These days, both are sorely tested, for we have become a nation divided, or more precisely, fractured and fragmented, both in our collective and personal identities. We have become a people searching for answers to whom we are as a people, a nation, a community, a family, and as individuals. We used to know who we were, for we shared a common ideal, founded upon principles of freedom and independence and “We the people.” We trusted in the providence of Almighty God and believed we lived in a land blessed abundantly by a Creator who had endowed us with unalienable rights to “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.” But, alas, no longer. We have turned E Pluribus Unum on its head, no longer are the many united into one nation, but rather, De Se, Plurimos, one nation divided into many. Instead of a common ideal we now profess to a multitude of fragmented, incoherent ideologies. Instead of government of the people, by the people, for the people, we now find ourselves a people of the government, by the government, for the government. We have relinquished our individual freedoms and independence and subordinated our unalienable rights through apathy and Weltschmerz (a growing feeling of melancholy and world-weariness.) Simply put, as a people, we just don’t care. We have become a people more interested in our individual creature comforts than what has been taken from us; we would rather be served than to serve, spoon-fed rather than self-fed, uninformed rather than well-informed, blissfully intoxicated rather than level-headed and sober.
Trust has been trampled as a result of the seemingly unending onslaught of deliberate lies and distortions which regularly come to light. For many, God is no longer trustworthy; God is but a myth, a figment of the imaginative minds of a dwindling group of unreasoning mental Neanderthals; only the god of self is to be trusted until even that selfsame god proves to be untrustworthy. At the core of our disillusionment and Weltschmerz is the steadfast refusal to accept reality for what it is: truth.
Reality is a harsh taskmaster for it demands that we see things as they are, not as we vainly wish them to be. No matter how difficult, unpleasant, painful or terrifying life might be, denying the truth of it will not, cannot alter the reality of it. Believing something to be true when it clearly and unmistakably is not so, changes nothing; it is merely a self-imposed fantasy, a delusion forced upon the unwilling mind to deny what the mind knows to be the truth.
Wake up America!
Just my thoughts for a Tuesday, for what it is worth.
