By GEORGE A. KENDALL
I woke up very early one morning recently and found myself lying there for a couple of hours, brooding about the situation in the world today: the China virus, the worldwide rioting stirred up by far-left groups in response to the killing of George Floyd, the chaotic political situation, and the mess in the Catholic Church, which ought to be a source of spiritual help in this dire situation but is finding it harder and harder to speak with any authority.
Now, progressives are starting to tell us that if Trump is re-elected, the blue states are likely to secede, and thus break up the United States. Those of us on the right are inclined to think that if Trump doesn’t win, the red states will secede and break up the union, either situation being likely to bring on civil war.
And then there is a kind of reign of terror happening, as people are accused of racism with absolutely no grounds for the accusation, and then they grovel and abjectly apologize, but generally lose their jobs and their reputations anyway. What is truly sickening is not only the unjust humiliation of these persons but the way the people who ought to defend them immediately run for cover.
Whatever happened to civic courage, anyway? For that, I guess you have to actually believe in something.
And then, there is the mindless destruction of symbols of America’s past — not only statues of Confederate generals and statesmen like Robert E. Lee and Jefferson Davis, but those of the founding fathers of our nation, notably George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, who owned slaves. A particularly massive dose of hate seems to be reserved for the Confederate flag, which BLM and Antifa see as a symbol of racism. But the vast majority of the soldiers who fought in the Civil War did not own slaves. They fought for their homes and for their families and for the region which was home for them, not for slavery, and therefore saw the Confederate flag as a symbol of resistance to tyranny.
Sensible people, who are becoming rather scarce, understand that we are rooted and grounded in the past, that metaphorically speaking, the past is the soil in which individuals, communities, and states can grow and thrive. When we are cut off from the past, we perish. In Burke’s phrase, we become like “flies of a summer.” Without continuity with the past we have no future and are nothing.
Yet the dream of the kind of rabid ideologue we are dealing with has always been to destroy everything connected to the past and start the world over again from the beginning — in other words, to get rid of the world God created and replace it with one of their own making. This dream, when people try to make it real, inevitably leads to mass murder.
The kind of thinking characteristic of groups like Antifa and BLM (Black Lives Matter), not to mention the many others which have grown and flourished in the poisoned soil of the so-called Enlightenment, has to be seen as a kind of mental illness arising out of rebellion against God, a disease of the spirit. And the name of the disease is ideology.
And then there is the pervasiveness of untruth in the situation we have been suffering through in the last few months. An instance of this is the assertion, by leftist groups, that America is a nation uniquely steeped in racism, with “systemic racism” ever-present to prevent black people from improving their lot.
This is counter-factual nonsense, which anyone familiar with American history knows. Those who actually believe it, as opposed to those who only pretend to believe lest they be labeled racists, are generally victims of our public schools, which indoctrinate but do not educate. The facts are: In the 1860s, the United States outlawed slavery. In the 1960s, laws were enacted banning racial discrimination in employment, housing, public accommodations, and so on. These laws enabled many black people to rise into the middle class or higher, some even becoming wealthy. Does this look like systemic racism?
The latter is an ideological myth inflicted on us by leftists who want to ride it to total power over the American people. Most of them are whites exploiting blacks to achieve their own ambitions.
This whole bizarre situation generates in many of us a feeling of the surreal, a sensation Eric Voegelin noted in the 1950s when he spoke of how the ideological madness of that time could “pervade a society with the weird, ghostly atmosphere of a lunatic asylum.” And the 1950s seem like a pretty sane time compared to what we are experiencing now!
It reminds me of an experience I had many years ago: When I was 14 I traveled with my mother to a clinic in Kansas City, Mo., in hopes that treatments offered there would help me to walk without the braces I wore due to polio. It was my first time out of Michigan, and the trip involved two weeks of new experiences — traveling by train, being in a much bigger city than any I had experienced, and more.
The last evening in Kansas City, a sudden sense of unreality came upon me, a feeling that all the things I was seeing were imaginary, like a dream. It was a frightening experience and my mother got quite alarmed, wondering, no doubt, if her son had become a candidate for admission to the laughing academy (fortunately, by morning, the episode, which psychiatrists call derealization, came to an end). That experience is, I think, a good image for the world in which we live and suffer in 2020, a world where it is more and more common for people to say that “nothing is real.”
And that statement is the last frontier of the Enlightenment. It is the rejection of being, and there is just nowhere to go beyond that intellectually. The only thing to do then is to put it into practice through destruction of the social order and mass murder.
And so, here we are in the Kingdom of Unreality, also known as the Kingdom of Satan. Clearly, there are very dark times ahead, times of persecution of the Church and of those faithful to Christ. It will be a time requiring much prayer and much courage, even to the point of martyrdom, as well as hard (and dangerous) work to keep the faith alive, waiting confidently for Mary’s Immaculate Heart to triumph.
(© 2020 George A. Kendall)
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