Written May 25, 2020 but how much more applicable to 2021 graduates as we realize how deep the deep state goes and how cold the fingers of the CCP reaching into every aspect of our great nation.
Yet I am encouraged by activism from groups like Turning Point USA, in spite of the alarming inroads into politics, education,journalism, sports, entertainment, social media and even medicine by Marxist ideologues.
Congratulations to the graduates of 2020 from a graduate of 1965 which was also a very strange year to graduate according to Dr. James Dobson, child psychologist and founder of Focus on the family.
How weird is this to finish off your 12 years of schooling with a world-wide so called Pandemic that cuts you off from your final semester and all the best parts of being a senior? Now that it's your turn they turn out the lights and send you off to cyber-space, digital land or Zoom land. So how do you like your free trial of Socialism?
I thought about digging out my yearbook, but there are too many spiders in my basement. Did you guys even get a yearbook? I was Art Editor of my yearbook for a couple of years running and I remember the flurry of activity to meet printing deadlines so maybe your yearbook is only digital?
When my middle son graduated from Grove City College a small but strongly religious Presbyterian school my husband and I went to PA for his graduation and I was so impressed by the parents and grandparents that attended I wrote up an essay entitled “In Loco Parentis”. If you didn't get exposed to Latin in school which I suspect, because Latin teachers were a dying breed teaching a dead language when I was in school, then you might think with some exposure to Spanish that this phrase has refers to your “ crazy parents”. Having gone through it three times myself when my darling boys went out of state to college, it is not easy to relinquish the care and feeding of the child you nurtured and protected like a she bear for 18 years to an institution of higher learning suddenly one day in fall. Especially with the track record academia has for turning freshman raised in a religious home into agnostics, atheists, budding socialists, Buddhists, environmentalists and vegetarians seemingly overnight.
I have a theory that the reason many of my generation is rabidly anti-Communism is that '65 was the year the epic film Dr. Zhivago came out and it showed the dramatic shift from private ownership to the state confiscating everything. Well off people were forced to share their homes with less fortunates which may sound like a good idea when you are 18 but to the average hard working capitalist, not so much. Maybe assigning the movie to incoming freshmen in college would go a long way to defeating the socialist agenda.
Besides taking prayer out of schools in 1963 they lowered the age of voting. Before 1971 the voting age used to be 21 when I was a youth but they lowered it to 18 with the argument that if you were old enough to go fight in a war you were old enough to vote. Actually a lot of 17 year-olds fought bravely and died in World War II but the world was a different place then and people grew up early.
Believe it or not the sexual revolution had only just started and abortion was not legal in most states. Unmarried couples did not live together before marriage and divorce was not common. All that changed rapidly around the year I graduated.
Subsequent generations have had relative calm until Sep 11, 2001 when our world changed forever and some of us realized we were at war, an undeclared war. You have grown up in wartime and it's all you've ever known. You have been groomed and indoctrinated for a New American Revolution to take America as we know it down from its high and lofty perch and replace it with a socialist Utopia where everyone has enough and no one has too much which may seem reasonable and quite just to an 18 year-old but scares the hell out of those of us who understand socialism and communism and have seen its failures and its murderous path in various experiments like the soviet Union, China, Cuba and Venezuela. Humanistic governance without God just substitutes God with false gods and tyrants and ultimately does not work. Margaret Thatcher former British Prime Minister said Socialism falls apart when you run out of other peoples money.
Other Brits have weighed in on the subject "If you're not liberal when you're young, you have no heart. If you're not conservative when you're older, you have no brain." Despite the writer's cautious use of "attributed" and "paraphrase," as said by Churchill but it seems to be agreed upon by more than one thinker including Edmund Burke.
That is why I think lowering the vote to 18 contributed to the demise of America and was part of a long range liberal strategy to “Fundamentally change America”. The public school system being a major cause as well.
(Public) “Education is a most powerful ally of humanism, and every public school is a school of humanism. What can the theistic Sunday School meeting once a week, and teaching only a fraction of the children, do to stem the tide of a five day program of Humanistic teachings?” Charles Francis Potter.
Rev. Dr. Charles Francis Potter (October 28, 1885 – October 4, 1962) was an American Unitarian minister, theologian, and author.
In 1923 and 1924, he became nationally known through a series of debates with Dr. John Roach Straton, a fundamentalist Christian. They were soon published in four volumes entitled The Battle Over the Bible, Evolution versus Creation, The Virgin Birth—Fact or Fiction? and Was Christ Both Man and God?
In 1925 he was adviser on the Bible to Clarence Darrow in his defense of John Thomas Scopes, a schoolteacher who was charged with teaching evolution in his classes. The story is told in the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.
Charles could have been a progenitor of Harry Potter which has had a great influence upon readers since 1997.
There have been eight Harry Potter movies but a movie that came out the year I graduated, 1965, had as much effect on me and perhaps my generation as the Harry potter series had on subsequent generations. That film is Dr. Zhivago and in spite of the tangled and adulterous relationships in the plot, which I have always found troubling, there is a powerful and moving depiction of Russia in the throes of revolution. The anarchy resulting in the annihilation of the Czar and his whole family show a truly traumatic time ushering in the Russian Revolution, ending the monarchy and after years of civil war replacing it with Communism and the creation of the Soviet Union. The dramatization of this era in the Dr. Zhivago film convinced me of the horrors of atheistic Communism and the futility of trying to govern men without God.
Even Ralph Waldo Emerson, American poet and non-traditional thinker in the 19th century opined “All I have seen teaches me to trust the Creator for all the things I have not seen.”
I hope you will pick up a copy of Boris Pasternack's Dr. Zhivago or see the film before you vote in November.
Congratulations on your graduation Class of 2020! You have been given the gift of being born in an exceptional country that believes in freedom and inalienable rights given to all men and women by God. Go forth and keep this Constitutional Republic as the Founders so brilliantly designed it.
