I’m not without sympathy for those on the left, because I remember well what it was like to be amongst them.
I’m grateful I didn’t physically maim anyone while a part of that darkness. I’m thankful I didn’t terrorize anyone. I’m sorry I committed acts of senseless vandalism and mayhem. And I regret any successful recruiting to the cause of nihilism for which I may have been responsible.
That was a long time ago – probably at least 40 years.
Still, I do remember how easy it was to be part of the left – and I mean the hard left, not just the kind of liberalism that is more in vogue today than it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
Being part of the left – either hard of soft – is a gutless choice. You never really have to say no to anything except the opposition, common sense and God’s wisdom.
That’s what I see all around me today – in Hollywood, on shameless display at the Oscars last week, throughout my formerly beloved state of California, from Los Angeles to Sacramento, from the Democratic Party, for which I dutifully voted like an automaton from 1972 through 1980, to what we euphemistically still call “the mainstream media,” for which I worked through the early 1990s.
Rebellion against reason and righteousness is rewarded by the left and has been since I was a teenager. I realized that when, as an infamous high-school radical in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was recruited by prestigious colleges and universities – not for academic achievement, but for revolutionary rhetoric.
Sound familiar? It’s the same phenomenon that ultimately resulted in eight years of President Barack Obama.
The only difference between then and now is that academia is devoted to inculcating a rigid form of totalitarian socialist thought that would have made Stalin proud.
There’s an old saying, “If you’re not a liberal at 20, you don’t have a heart. If you’re still a liberal at 30, you don’t have a brain.” There are apparently many derivations of this adage dating back to at least the 19th century, which certainly suggests it resonates with truth. When someone would suggest something like this to me when I was 20, I would become enraged. When I turned 26, I began to understand the timeless wisdom.
The problem today is that people are just not growing up fast enough. Maturity has been retarded. The search for truth has been hindered, obstructed, deliberately and systematically encumbered by an avalanche of propaganda.
And, today, the free-and-open exchange of ideas, free speech and the free press are all threatened by a few corporations that exert a growing hammerlock of control on the internet – a once-promising frontier that offered just the opposite, a level playing field for all voices, perspectives and beliefs.
Is all this some grand conspiracy? No. Don’t get me wrong. There are plenty of people conspiring to push the country in this direction. But there’s an equal amount of willing self-deception at play. Even many of the leaders of the left are incapable of discerning the truth, seeing reality, escaping their own vain imaginations.
And, incidentally, that’s just what God promised would happen to people who strayed from His path. The further removed you get from righteousness and truth, the harder it becomes to believe they even exist – or that their Author does.
That’s where we find ourselves today with America more deeply divided than at any other time in my life.
We can thank God for Donald Trump, a flawed man like any of us, who, more than any other leader in memory, stands up to the insanity that surrounds us and calls it what it is in simple, direct language – “fake news, lies, stupid, bad.” He’s giving us plenty to be happy about. He has accomplished amazing things in a short time period, but the resistance is strong. And, let’s be honest, he brings out the worst in them.
He’s given us a reprieve from the manufactured chaos and crisis, but the left is mobilizing its brain-dead zombie armies and phony voter rolls and will use any means necessary to neutralize him in 2018.
It’s not just a cultural war, it’s a spiritual one.
So, how do we fight back? We fight spiritual blindness and darkness with the Light. Pray for the Light to shine on America. Pray for the zombie resistance to awaken from their collective trance. Pray for spiritual revival. Pray for the blind to see.
It’s a big ask, but we serve a big God.
