https://amgreatness.com/2021/01/03/defenders-of-civilization/
The year 2020 witnessed a long series of writs lodged against an America beset with plague, quarantine, recessions, riot and arson, and the most contested election since 1876.
What was strange was not so much the anarchist Left’s efforts in the present to wipe away the past to recalibrate our Animal Farm future. What was odder were both the absurdities of the complaints against American civilization, and the unwillingness or inability of Americans to rebut them and defend their own culture.
Demonizing Our Past
In just a year, thousands of memorials and icons have vanished. Names have changed, words are banned. Careers were ruined. As new totalitarian rules were enshrined, old freedoms became despised.
Yet most of the country sat in lockdown quiet, as it was told that it, and its history, were toxic and culpable—and by whom exactly? Moralists like Labron James? Steve Kerr? Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez?
Were Americans in their 244th year suddenly to write checks, apologize, and pay penance to their angry self-described moral superiors?
A few schools apparently are no longer to be named after Abraham Lincoln, the president who saved the Union, destroyed the slave-holding Confederacy, and freed the slaves at a cost of nearly 700,000 American lives. Now 155 years after his assassination, the present generation—the most leisured, entitled, and wealthiest cohort in civilization’s history—deems him unworthy and unfit for any commemoration. Do any of the street-brawling Antifa radicals seem tough guys in comparison to the Union troops at Gettysburg or those who marched with Sherman?
Who or what does the Left offer in place in Lincoln—Che? Fidel? Malcolm X? Cesar Chavez? Margaret Sanger? Xi Jinping? FDR? Barack Obama? All would fall well short of the alleged standards applied by cancel culture. So what are we left with other than nothing? Diversity Academy A? Equity High School No. 3? Inclusion College IV? Campus 1619?
What happens if one principal, just a single superintendent, a few parents, three board members say, “Nope, we are not erasing Lincoln’s name, no way, no how”?
Little need be said of increasing tense racial relations, given that the collective optimism of a year ago during the booming 2019 economy—record low minority unemployment and the undepreciated powers of assimilation and integration were beginning to make race more incidental than essential—has dissipated. That was then, and this is now after pandemic, lockdown, recession, George Floyd’s tragic death, riot and looting, a bitter election, and an ongoing cultural revolution.
Cornell University is now mandating flu shots for its on-campus students, but with allowances for nonwhites to petition for exemptions, in the manner of those pedigreed epidemiologists who all but said science should be ignored in ranking those to be vaccinated by their race. Had someone in 1980, 1990, or 2005 predicted such things, he would have been written off as a dystopian crackpot.
