It will soon be Christmastime and I am always transported to my childhood, a time of gorgeous sunsets and those thoughts of limitless success now fading as the ever-deepening recession eats up food, sundries, and retirement money alike.
As the snow fell outside, in a room illuminated by a yellow electric candle reflected on frosty windows, my mother read the story, the story of the first Christmas to me from the Children’s Bible.
It had, once upon that particular time, been a busy evening. Carolers visited my grandmother, disabled for many years, singing “Silent Night,” and “Angels We Have Heard on High.” My brother and I helped my folks trim the Christmas tree, and my old man hung the stockings over the fireplace. Christmas Eve and we will attend the late service at the Methodist Church and sing the final hymns outside in the flurries. A late night snow meant a wonderland tomorrow.
We want to thank John Burtis for this Op-Ed. If you have an Op-Ed or LTE
you would like us to consider, please submit it to Editor@GraniteGrok.com.
As my mother finished reading she began singing an Irish lullaby to me and I drifted off into a contented sleep.
But as I write, I realize that somewhere in the intervening years, we have all lost our way. We are at war with ourselves, our country, our value system, our once shared morality, and each other. Politics has become a war of ideologies, made ever more stark every Christmas season, with trees banned, red and green colors outlawed, free speech under intense attack, and Christianity rests under the gun worldwide. Tolerance has given way to carping and has moved on to an extreme hatred decorated with a current disdain for what we all once held dearly.
In the dull drab colorless socialist “paradise” that the Democratic party is in such a hurry to have us inhabit, Christmas carols would be rare indeed, to say nothing of laws banning Christian carolers from singing their way through neighborhoods and mere Christian assembly. Colored lights in windows would be sparse in number, if not banned altogether, as would the pretty colored paper under even scarcer “holiday” trees – all falling under the rubric of worldwide conservation and numerous multi-trillion dollar efforts to change the weather.
Bibles, like the treasured books in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, would be passed down by word of mouth by the faithful where they’d gather surreptitiously in basements, attic hideaways, and abandoned houses, like Christians of old in the catacombs, following the end of the Bible’s sale for being hate speech, followed by their public confiscation. Churches have been closed and have been sold or taken over by the inimical bureaucratic state.
A highly politicized police force is both powerless and unwilling to prevent roving bands of toughs from roughing us up. Laws have been passed, in the interim, doing away with bail which encourages thugs to ever greater predations.
The Democrat nomenklatura made up of the Hollywood glitterati, billionaire fops and poseurs, and their pet politicians who always vote against our interests would glide around in secure armored limousines. Meanwhile, we proles and plebes, mere kulaks if you will, in our rags, scuttle about in their headlights.
I don’t know where we’re heading in America nor what the Democrat end plan is for us beyond our eventual elimination, but based on the evidence, the portents are not good. Politicians openly deride our troops with ever greater time spent haranguing them with race and pronouns, while encouraging our enemies who have been massively armed by a feckless Democrat leadership. Terrorists, once upon a time caught and tried, have been freed by these same leaders who value the criminal class far more than honest citizens. The Democrat Party is hell-bent on the destruction of Christianity, the elimination of free speech, and the seizing of firearms purchased legally.
Public school administrators and school boards have become willing dupes and shills for the most inane ideas while racing along in the furtherance of these same Democrat goals. Teachers preach and demonstrate all manner of frivolous inanity at the expense of any semblance of the learning necessary to function in an increasingly technical society.
The mainstream “press” is neither “mainstream” nor seemingly ever accurate, and their prevarications and innuendoes in the promotion of these same dangerous ideals are so outrageous that only the limited education of the publicly educated masses prevents any hue or cry.
A feeling of general happiness has given way to a bleak cheerlessness, contrived trumpery, and the outright demagoguery of our “liberal” politicians, who are, after all, in league with their media cheerleaders, who fawn over them like toadies and trumpet their limited accomplishments.
At Christmas, I doubt that the carolers will ever visit me again. It has grown far too dangerous in today’s America to sing songs of joy on our garbage and homemade tent-lined streets in this, our once most joyous season.
As I contemplate our nation’s fading future and our preening liberal leadership, it makes me sad.
