For those of us who want to protect, defend, preserve and pass down our way of life, we are very late. Our children are being taught that all cultures are equal and that America has become hateful.
By Diane Weber Bederman
I was in New York for the Women’s March January 21. One of the signs I saw was held by a teenager – about 16 years old. The sign includes a beautiful woman wearing the American flag- as a hijab. Does this young lady know the meaning of the hijab? Does she know that Islam is misogynistic as she carries her sign proudly denouncing Donald Trump?
She fears that President Trump will take away her rights! He is against Planned Parenthood. Does she have any idea that Planned Parenthood is involved in late-term abortions? With procedures that are painful as the fetus is cut up in pieces in a way that makes it possible to “salvage” body parts for sale. Do you think she was told about that?
There is a fist on the sign as well, that looks a lot like the Black Panthers fist. Do you think she knows the history of this symbol? There are other pictures, including one about the LGBTQ community. And then at the bottom of the sign the words, “Make America Kind Again,” as if all this divisiveness is the result of Donald Trump running for and becoming president.
Who made it unkind? Who divided the people into groups? Who put the police on the firing line and made them targets? Who pitted white working- class Americans against others? Who demeaned those who believe in God? Do Black Lives Matter more than other lives? Isn’t President Trump trying to address the root causes of the failure of black Americans to do well?
Yet the young people are holding these signs – loud and proud.
Most of you who read my posts know that I fight for our democratic values; values I wrote about in my book, Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values; values that come to us from the Jewish people passed forward for more than 3500 years. The Jewish people kept them alive and the Christians brought them to the new World. Puritans brought the Hebrew Bible to America and Canada, read the scriptures in Hebrew and decided that these values will be the absolute values for America and Canada.
While we fight to save this extraordinary ethic, miraculous values, our children and grandchildren are running around extolling the virtues of every country. Followers of anthropologist Franz Boas, who wrote as recently as the mid-20th century that there are no inferior or superior cultures, but that all cultures are equal (do you think he was aware of Nazism?), although I doubt anyone under 40 knows anything about him.
I fear we are too late. Too many people have succumbed to the siren call of kumbaya. Those of us born just after WWII might be too late. I spoke to a 16-year-old girl about Donald Trump. She was in tears. She was crying to me that because of him, rape culture will take over America; women will be abused (they will in Muslim families where women are not treated as equals); that gays will be forced to go through conversion therapy; that Muslims will be rounded up and taken I don’t know where. Black students at her private school expressed fear. About what – I also don’t know. Her teachers are talking about Donald Trump in this manner?
She told me that the day after the election, the whole school went to the auditorium for a good cry! The students were devastated. But on the day of the Inauguration, the school did not televise it. This is American brainwashing – not education.
The Inauguration is the peaceful transfer of power and has been taking place since 1789. It should be celebrated every four years. It is the Office of the President that we respect. But this private school did not feel it necessary to share the event. Had it been Hillary, what do you think this school would have done? Fireworks? Is it any wonder we are raising generations of people incapable of critical thinking?
I listened to President Trump and thought, here is a man who will take us back to the ethic that made America great. And yet hundreds of thousands of people are marching against him. Standing up for the ideology of democracy has become not only passé, but politically incorrect and worthy of attack, especially on social media.
I can only hope that this travesty of education is taking place only in the rarified air of New York and California. And that the new Secretary of Education will take a good look at courses in civics and bring back classes about the origins of the ethic that makes democracy possible in America.
I leave you with this story.
A few years ago, Robert Redford was in a movie, “All is Lost.” At the very end of his ordeal, we see him slipping away into the ocean, having given up all hope. Yet at the last moment we see above him a search light and we see him see the light. How does it end? Does he choose life or death?
I see this as a metaphor about our way of life.
Will we reach up to the light of the Judeo/Christian ethic, or will we succumb to political correctness and moral and cultural relativism and the end of freedom as we know it?
We must wait and let the story unfold.
(Copyright: dianebederman.com 2017)
Diane Weber Bederman is a multi-faith, hospital-trained chaplain who lives in Canada, just outside Toronto. She writes about religion in the public square and mental illness on her blog, “The Middle Ground: The Agora of the 21st Century.” Bederman is the author of “Back to the Ethic: Reclaiming Western Values,” published Dec. 2015 by Mantua Books (available on Amazon).