So it's the Fourth of July. Time for sparklers, firecrackers, and patriotic zeal, right?---Yeah, I suppose. And we're doing the Fourth of July thing--there's a nice red, white, and blue bouquet on the table; we've got plans for a picnic party and fireworks this evening--yet I can't escape a sense of mourning today, like being at the hospital bed of a dying relative and sensing that a final good-bye is coming near. I almost had tears in my eyes as I unfurled our flag this morning and hung it out. As much as I want to believe in a hope for a recovery, now it looks like the disease process is just too far gone. Sad. It's been a nice country.
And just like someone working through the impending loss of a loved one, I'm remembering the good times. Remember when people were proud to be an American? Remember when they called it "the Good Ole USA"? Remember when it was "let freedom ring!"--Liberty and Democracy would always prevail and eventually ensure that right would win out--wasn't that what they taught us? I think about glorious July Fourths of the past--times when the bands at parades played patriotic songs, and I knew the words--because they taught us those songs at school!
Yeah, they really did. Our hearts would swell with patriotic pride and excitement as our grade school teachers taught us to love America--back when more people thought there was something here to value and something to love. They didn't teach us to duck our heads in shame and to apologize--they were too busy teaching us about Benjamin Franklin, the pilgrims, the founding fathers. And then there was the Liberty Bell--when they told us its peal was heard "around the world", in our childish innocence that took everything literally, we really thought it was somehow, magically true! But children grow up, and sometimes innocence gets violated by reality. And just a few days ago, that happened to this entire nation.
Friday, June 26, 2015 marked a death-knell day in America. The Supreme Court, a body I had always been taught to admire and hold in the highest esteem, in an act of jaw-dropping judicial overreach and crazed lunacy mandated that homosexual "marriage" would be legal in all fifty states. Could it really have come to this? People are now talking about stripping tax exempt status from churches. Here? In America? Christians who cannot, in good conscience, decorate cakes or provide flowers for homosexual "weddings" are now being run out of business, sued, fined, and financially destroyed---and our Republicans in congress sit there...doing nothing...and letting it all happen. Again.
Just like they did with Obama-care. Just like they're doing with our defenseless borders and run-amok immigration. Just like they're doing with Eric Holder and Fast and Furious, Lois Lerner and the IRS scandal, Hillary Clinton and the Benghazi attack. They sit there indolently, maybe hold a few hearings and beat their chest, spouting rhetoric--but unless there are dollar signs attached to it, nothing gets done...ever. When all of this was brewing, the majority of our leaders looked the other way, and now they appear to have walked away entirely.
So yeah, it's been a nice country. I hope it survives...I really want it to. But if someone doesn't stand up and stop the train from barreling over the cliff, it's just a matter of time before this once glorious and beautiful train crashes and burns, becoming one more entry in the death registry of historic nations. Perhaps the epitaph on the tombstone should read, "having had every chance to preserve our freedom to be a righteous, prosperous nation, this is what we did with it".
Please, God, my prayer today is "let me be wrong--let this all be just an overreaction on my part." And I'm looking around the hospital room (or is this a hospice?) asking for somebody, please, anybody to tell me that somewhere, somehow, there may still be a glimmer of hope for our once glorious, so-beautiful nation. After all, sometimes even false hope is better than no hope at all.
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