Editor's Note: This column is co-authored by Loyd Pettegrew
In 1776, a patriot penned the following: “These are the times that try men’s souls...”. When these profound words opened the first of thirteen numbered pamphlets titled The American Crisis, Thomas Paine was arguing for the rebellion, the infant revolution that was teetering on collapse in the frigid December cold. These words fed the hopes of starving troop and raised the question, what is worth fighting for and why? It was clear thinking, defining thoughts that today would be dissected, discredited and discarded by the woke police, a group that pretends to make society better and likely will never be defunded.
Now are the times that try our National identity; the ideal of Americanism is on trial, indicted for newly defined and resurrected historical sins that give a rear-view mirror focus to a manufactured crisis created to promote a progressive agenda of control. The idea is to promote a national utopia, a place of cleansed but not forgiven societal sins that can wipe free our history, allowing the aggrieved a token tope that their grievances have been listened to and rectified--band-aided just to make their personal emptiness feel fuller, and at the same time, extort reparations with government power as just compensation.
Had Paine written his famous opening line in 2021 and posted it on social media, he likely would have been cancelled for using men’s soul. First of all, men’s is not inclusive enough for the Wokesters at Amazon and Facebook, and soul implies a spiritual entity that answers to a higher power, Almighty God. Neither men or God are currently acceptable in progressive parlance. Paine’s cry for Nationalism today would become muted, the victim of Wokeism, a means to make sure every thought is scrubbed and cleansed so that no individual or group will feel oppressed by what they perceive as systemic hatred or discrimination directed against them.
Progressives use “racism” writ large as both their raison d'etat and their primary justification for today’s national cleansing in the unassailable name of social justice. Cedrick-Michael Simmons has termed racism today’s “third rail of politics,” and its practitioners social justice warriors who deny its enduring, sinister presence. If you aren’t woke and mistakenly touch that electrified hot metaphoric rail, you will be called out, harassed and pursued until you will wish you were invisible. The left will shout “They shoot horses don’t they?” as their vitriol poisons you. You are the problem, the purveyor of hate because of your absence of ethnicity or skin color. Wokeism can paint you as a racist white with a hopelessly broad brush, but never with shades of black or brown. Wokism allows the accusing fickle finger of fate to be pointed at you but never backward in self-reflection of the accuser. Since racism is now defined as both habitual and enduring, the term has become vacuous as redefined by the Wokesters. Do black lives matter? Of course they do, but do they matter more than those who are the victims of other more insidious social injustices?
Nationalism is pride of country, political agenda, history. Fortunately, ours didn’t begin in 1619 like woke history maintains. It can be a unifying force for good such as American’s war effort in the 1940’s targeted at a dictator like Adolf Hitler and Showa Hirohito, forces that co-opted nationalistic pride by rationalizing racism. Millions died because that racist hate, fueled by rhetoric that convinced two societies to look the other way, to deny the reality of the day, and become accompanists to genocide, henceforth losing their souls.
Today, radical social justice warriors deny our nation’s greatest accomplishments and focus on elements of our history that in retrospect and by the social norms of the 21st Century, certainly were unfortunate and painful. Importantly, our nation has evolved significantly, healing the painful wounds of historical, time limited systemic racism. That evolutionary metamorphosis needs to be the focus of our national pride that 99.9 % of the time falls on the right side of history. The lives of all ethnic and societally oppressed groups have value and deserve equality, not by justifying history but by illuminating how a great nation prides itself in remedying its mistakes by becoming accepting of all humanity. When bad things happen, the knee jerk reaction is to blame it on racism. This is the result of generations of real and self-supposed victim hood. Cities burn and people die not because of the actual event that lights the flames, but because of the progressives that habitually make race the only issue while denying other inconvenient truths.
The result allows politicians like Maxine Moore Waters, to profit with woke power while our national greatness is diminished. Those who cry out for justice become the unjust, unwittingly morphing into the new violent slave masters of history. Welcome to the new world order.
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