All the following, in the same twenty-four hours, causing my head to spin?
There is little of it that rings new for anyone who follows the news. It is so redundantly tedious as to aggravate depressions while we struggle to rise above it, exploring imagined avenues of confrontation that will win out against the issues we have faced repetitiously for some time, and that we find threatening to our republic, our liberties, and down to our very lives as we simply want to walk down our streets in peace.
New this a.m.? The only prompt coming to mind this morning is the word ‘treason’. The definitions of that term are varied in expression but similar in substance. So I will take at face value the citation from Sir John Harington (1560-1612) as a ‘natural’ to get things rolling:
Treason doth never prosper,
what’s the reason?
For if it prosper,
none dare call it Treason.
“Of Treason”, 1877
I call it Treason. And apart from opposition Treason thrives. Treason masks its evil intentions by demanding the “fundamental transformation” of our Republic into an amoral Marxist-Socialist ‘democracy’ by trashing its most treasured symbols as racist, sexist, misogynist, you know the rest… In a time when the true Fascists can burn books, even to the volumes of printed Holy Scriptures held sacred by the Abrahamic faiths, we are compelled to understand that any attack on our symbols, national or religious, is an assault on the values that they represent and the traditions preserved in them.
So far this morning we have endured reports of the singer Macy Gray insisting on the replacement of the American Flag, ranting that the flag is “tattered, dated, divisive, and incorrect,” and that “It no longer represents democracy and freedom. It no longer represents ALL of us…” Those white stars, and those white stripes, how racist and hurtful to Persons Of Color…
A transgendered Olympic bike rider wants to win the Gold Medal so that he/she or whatever can publicly burn the American flag so to demonstrate to the world how he/she/they whatever opposes some imagined ‘fascism’, of which his/her/they sort bears the greater guilt. And this LGBTQIA+ brands our country as ‘immoral’.
Now comes the Silverton, Colorado mayor Shane Fuhrman announcing to the gathering at a meeting of the town trustees that the Pledge of Allegiance will be banned. The excuse? “Direct and indirect threats,” and inappropriate comments “in and out of public meetings and general divisiveness and issues created in our community.” The mayor presented no evidence to support either alleged threats or the remainder of his blather. It appears that all the factious need to accomplish their treasonous designs and abolish our cherished symbols is to create some imaginary dangers to public meetings.
The heroes are the people present who rejected his treason and recited the Pledge anyway.
That is how we must deal with the attacks on this Republic and its prevailing symbol of liberty for all, whether they are as overt as the mayor and his sort we have put up with for years, or they are thinly veiled under the accusatory rubric of “white supremacy” created by the sin-loving conduits of false witness against their neighbors.
Fight the good fight, for our faiths, for our natural rights, and for the symbols bearing our liberty as a free Republic,
Father David+