My maternal grandparents were both born within a year of each other, 1903 and 1904. As a schoolboy, when I learned this was just around the time the Wright brothers took flight and that Henry Ford began producing Model A’s I realized how much change they had lived through. Beyond the airplane and the mass produced automobile there was radio, movies, television, a man on the moon. It fascinated little me to think they had lived in both worlds.
I’m not as old as they were when this dawned on me but I am taking a moment to look back at the sweeping changes I’ve seen. I remember the first VCRs, compact discs, and the dawn of the internet. It is not, however, being a witness to technology that leaves me shocked. What I have lived through is a radical shift in culture. Women’s lib was a thing when I was a kid. But it was a weird thing. Today, in my pantry, there is a box of Kix cereal. It says on it, “Kid tested, parent approved.” Yeah, for old timers like me, it used to be “Kid tested, mother approved.” The change itself isn’t huge, but that it has reached something as homespun and normal as cereal is.
We are living not just on a slippery slope but we are riding a raging landslide. In the space of ten years we went from Democrats voting to defend marriage to Republicans giving up on it. We went from commitments to keep women out of combat to registering them for a draft to allowing men into their restrooms to allowing men to compete against them in the Olympics. We went from “Don’t ask, don’t tell” to “Don’t call him her or you’ll be cancelled.”
Not long ago I watched in horror as pundits on a main stream news channel argued, as if they were normal Americans who had actually taken a civics class, about how the government must do something to silence people who say things they disagree with. It was as slick a propaganda move in favor of censorship as Goebbels could have come up with, as if when the cameras turned off they all went home in their Chevrolets to watch baseball, and eat hot dogs and apple pie.
My shock, however, soon leveled off to mere resignation. Why should I be surprised at this turn? A country where we are told to “follow the science” which in turn tells us that boys are girls and girls boys, except for the ones who want to be some other thing, is not a country that will defend free speech. A country where a federal agency charged with controlling diseases can outlaw removing unpaying tenants is not a country that will honor, in any way, limitations on federal powers.
When we lived through the steroid era of baseball, a friend who had played in the major leagues made an astute observation. Why, he wondered, are we surprised that men would cheat in baseball when so many of them cheat on their wives? Which vow is more sacred? In the same way, a country that legally protects the “right” of parents to hire medical assassins to murder their own children isn’t a country that should ever surprise us. We are living in the twilight of a once great civilization. The sun is setting. But be of good cheer. The Son has risen.
