Of Christmases past and future

Way back in the day, about the second year I had my blog, I posted this about an old MTV skit I remembered from my early undergrad years.  It was when The Monkees had released a new 'Greatest Hits' album and were going on tour again after all those years.  

For that time in our lives, the Monkees seemed ancient history, as did most things in the 1960s.  This was despite the fact that by the 80s, the 1960s were being sanctified by our media culture as the decade when gods roamed the Earth.  That was when all was right with the world; all was sex hope and drugs optimism for the future. At least until the dark days, until Reagan. 

As superficial as their contribution to the decade of the infallible 60s were, the Monkees still had a part to play.  And that was gobbled up by MTV over 1986, which was the 20th Anniversary of the Monkees' primetime premier.  This culminated in a little Christmas skit featuring the Monkees who had agreed to tour together, and the one Monkee (Mike Nesmith) who didn't join the reunion appearing in a surprising cameo. 

Ah, I looked back on that in 2011 and beheld the relative innocence of it all.  This was MTV, the cutting edge of pop culture, of the 80s' decade of greed meets the lag over 70s and 60s porn culture of drugs and sex.  This is the MTV that would eventually produce shows encouraging drug use, group sex and even accepting attitudes toward teen suicide.  Yet it looks as family oriented and tame as anything Disney would show today, if it would even do so.  

I commented on the post then about how things had changed.  How, by 2011, the world had gone in directions we never imagined in 1986.  For instance, we had elected our first black president, and the narrative was still about how this was a monumental leap forward in our country's troubled past regarding race relations.  After all, as my son noted, if Obama lost reelection in 2012, they could pull the race card and say his reelection loss proves we're still a vile, racist Nazi state.  When he was reelected, however, that card was gone.  So it became incumbent upon the Left to find new ways to keep the 'America as Racist Nazi State' narrative going, hence the rise of BLM and the 1619 Project mentality only after 2012. Things I hadn't imagined when I posted the reflection of Christmases past in 2011. 

So I got to thinking about what has happened since 2011 that is different.  When I looked back in 2011 at the previous 25 years, and how much had changed, I also pondered the future.  How much would change?  What is different now?  After all, I wondered what things would be like in ten years back when I posted that.  

Below are a few observations of things that are completely off the scale from what I imagined would be in 2011, even then I knew they would be as different now as things were back then 25 years after the Monkees sang Christmas:

* No such thing as boys and girls?  That's right kiddies.  Beyond a doubt number one on my list of 'didn't see that coming.'  Apparently the entire global scientific community was 100% wrong for the history of the global scientific community.  All those little cartoons about DNA and genes and genitals and sexual reproduction were just a vast heterosexual Christian conspiracy.  It turns out there is no objective gender, just like the mysterious connection between sex and procreation has yet to be solved.  And more to the point, if you insist boys and girls do exist, you can be fired, fined and in some enlightened cultures, threatened with legal retaliation.  In 2011 I did not see that coming by a long shot. 

* Forgiveness, freedom and equality are simply tools of white supremacy and European colonialism.  Apparently added to this list is a growing number of subjects including math, astronomy, history and almost anything under the sun.  In fact, a song or movie or book by a white person can be assumed to be racist because it's by a white person.  At that point, it can be edited, banned or labeled with disclaimers accordingly.  Hence the dearth of commercials and advertisements featuring whites or white families.  Watch TV for a day and you could count on one hand minus three fingers the number of Caucasians featured in ads.  The above MTV clip would not happen today, if for no other reason the majority of whites featured in the performances.  Remember, statues and pictures of Mary or Jesus done in a European manner were being destroyed simply because of skin color. I haven't seen such a purposeful purge of an ethnic group from mass media since Germany in the 1930s.  I wouldn't have thought that could happen in 2011. Which leads to the next shocker: 

* The only solution to racism is more racism.  So apparently it's no longer vogue to strive for a colorblind society and put race behind us.  The only hope for America is to keep racism alive and well, to judge and condemn or exonerate and reward based on ethnicity, skin color, and a variety of ethnic characteristics.  In fact, so true is this that if you insist on judging based on content of character rather than the color of skin, you're a Nazi.  So true is this, that a growing number of institutions are calling on their white employees to renounce and repent their white skin color and own up to the blood libel of all racism that belongs only to the white race, or you're fired.  Everyone is in on it, including religious leaders, businesses and all things pop culture.  Again, didn't see that coming either, even as late as 2011. 

* President Donald Trump.  Nope, would have thought you were joking in 2011.  It's not an indictment of the MAGA Trumpers as much as a testimony to the deplorable impotence of those resisting the global Left that conservatives turned to someone like Trump.  But see if any Never Trumpers admit that. 

* No more nations.  As my oldest said, when the most visible ambassador for nationalism is Hitler, you know nationalism is going to be a tough sell.  This isn't new, and trashing nationalism has been going on since I was a wee one.  But opponents and critics were usually quick to distinguish between trashing nationalism and affirming the right of nations to exist.  Well, no more.  In just the last couple years, a growing tide of commentators - including the pope - have come out and all but said nations have got to go, and it's time for a borderless world, most likely in the image of some global Socialist dreamland.  Even by 2011, I didn't think there would be such open calls to put a bullet in the head of nations; especially first and foremost that American nation.  But here we are. 

*The cleansing blood of communism.  Over just last year I read no fewer than a dozen pieces and editorials calling on us to consider communism, think on communism as our only hope, look at the blessings of communism, or see why communists and communist states were a damn sight better than our nation of racism and genocide.  From Pope Francis trying to love the communist even if he doesn't love the communism, to full throated calls for communism as the hope of America, you could have told me this would happen in 2011 and I would have laughed.  Not that I didn't know that there has always been a leftwing love affair with the Reds, but I didn't think it would happen this soon, within living memory of the Soviet Union and in sight of Communist China.  Yet young people have been taught in pop culture, the media, and our schools to prefer the Hammer and Sickle over the Stars and Stripes (my boys' World History textbook had several overt sections singing the praise of Lenin, Mao and Marx, as opposed to our nation of bigotry, segregation and genocide).  So what should we expect? 

*The Beast that is corporatism.  That is, the biggest threat to emerge in the destruction of Western Civilization in deference to a Marxist inspired global state is the Corporate juggernaut.  Almost overnight, vast, multi-billion dollar corporate entities have found it in their best interest to destroy the heritage of America, the traditions and values of Christian Western civilization, and to turn as many into drugged up, sexed up thralls of the worldwide state as possible. Conservatives, having fought to protect corporate interests at all costs by eliminating any impediments to their growth, now find themselves looking around for protection and finding none.  This isn't to say corporations haven't caved for years to this or that interest if that's where the money was.  But we assumed that lust for profit wouldn't include the destruction of the Christian West, of America, of rights and freedoms and the Christian Faith as openly and nakedly as it has Corporate America has embraced.  And yet, here we are.  

*Homeschool ho!  Even as late as 2011, when I posted the Monkees post, we weren't seriously considering homeschool.  I would never say it hadn't crossed our minds.  But it always seemed so out of reach.  In only a year, however, that changed, as we marked what the schools had been doing.  Long and short, they had been fluffing our kids' grades in a sort of hush-money fashion - giving them high grades, letting them retake tests, giving them passes on missed assignments, so that our sons and 80% of the schools could be on the As and Bs honor rolls.  Why?  What parent will complain to a school when your kids are getting all As?   That allowed them to 'teach to the test' and, in hindsight, teach other things without parental interference.  Again, who is going to plow into a school when the kids are passing with flying colors?   That, as well as the bureaucratic nightmare that torpedoed our second son's love of science in deference to all important funding matrixes, sealed the deal.  Almost ten years later, and I'm thrilled we took the plunge. 

Those are only a few, but a few that are quite telling.  They also go a long way toward making the future of Western Civilization and the United States up for grabs.  I knew there had always been a desire to cut the US and the broader Western Civilization down to size.  But it's one of those things you imagine, even if left unchecked, would take countless generations to unfold.  I never imagined that ethnic cleansing, race hate, Inquisitorial intolerance and witch hunts, censorship and the full push to eradicate all culture and social norms based on ethnicity or civilizational roots would emerge and be embraced by almost everyone everywhere in the world. 

In 2011 that seemed as unlikely as moon colonies.  Now moon colonies still seem far away, but a post-Western world where so many assumptions of the West we figured were engrained in the human bloodstream forever now stand on the brink of eradication.   And in that same time, we've seen legions of those individuals and institutions we imagined would stand firm all but cave, surrender and convert to the modern leftist agnosticism.  

That's just nine years ago.  What will it be in nine more years?  What 'squares aren't round' fact will we be called upon to deny under threat of retaliation?  How many who we assume will stand firm will cave, fold and surrender?  Or, the bigger question, will being an orthodox Christian be illegal, will America exist, and will that dream of a global Marxist based totalitarian state finally come to fruition?  Only time will tell.