Somewhere in the middle of my raging levels of hot mess hormones, at roughly 15 or 16, I remember like it was yesterday that my grandmother got after me about my rising levels of angst and decreasing levels of interest in going to church on Sunday morning. As much as I loved my mother, it was my grandmother from whom I got the most helpful nuggets of wisdom and insight about the world I was heading into as my age continued to advance.
Typical of a textbook hormone-addled middle teenager, the more I argued that going to church was a waste of time, the more she reminded me that I had not the slightest idea of the precious value of time and the importance of properly prioritizing how it can be best spent. She reminded me that I had not been alive long enough to be so angry at a world I hadn’t yet come to fully comprehend, let alone appreciate and embrace, before continuing to her larger point, which I have never forgotten: It is only by the grace of God that we are able to experience even a single moment of our life, and he asks nothing of us in return except one hour a week.
In fairness to my grandmother, who was obviously 100% correct, there is a fundamental truth about life that grown-ups drive themselves crazy trying to teach children incapable of comprehending grown-up ideas; the greater the hurry of the child to reach adulthood, the slower (and more painful) will the evolution be of its resulting elder wisdom.
I can personally attest to the veracity of this claim, fathering children, surviving divorces, and being graced by God with a number of grandchildren, my grandmother’s words all those 50 years ago have kept me company and guided many of my steps throughout the entirety of my life. And what haunts me, now far closer to my end than my beginning, is how much worse off today’s up-and-coming generations are than mine was all those years ago.
Today’s “hurried children” – bereft of any inclination to humble themselves before greater wisdom than their own – have been raised to believe their sense of self-importance entitles them, somehow, to a greater standing in the world than those that came before them despite wanting nothing to do with any of the heavy lifting required to nourish, protect, and sustain what they are inheriting from our national elders.
And while it is clear that the decay of modern-age parenting and the Godless and soulless corruption of the education system lies at the heart of our problems with adequately readying future generations for the task of nourishing, protecting, and sustaining the American Nation, it is ultimately the fault of current and former National elders that allowed this to happen to our children in the first place. It’s uncomfortable, to be sure, but solving a problem, especially one that could end America as we know it, first requires accepting our own fault in its cause(s) before we can even begin to undo the mess we have let them make of it.
The current state of the American Nation has been 60 years in the making and will not be undone in one election, especially not a midterm election. The 2022 midterm election does, however, provide an opportunity to take that first step toward saving the nation from its own loss of humility and the overdose of its own vanity and self-indulgence that the young leadership class has succumbed to.
As my grandmother made clear all those years ago, just as it is with God, so too is it true that for All America has given each of us, asking nothing in return, the least we can do is give it that euphemistic 1 hour per week. This can be done in a number of simple enough ways, such as joining a precinct committee, attending a school board meeting, and talking to your children about the effects of their political and electoral choices on their everyday lives. Re-teach them to engage the representatives they vote for, calling their offices and following the votes they cast in Congress and sending them letters or attending their Town Hall meetings or sending letters to the editor of their local papers, or even engaging friends and Neighbors and going together in large groups when it’s time to cast the ballot – in person – in November.
For the love of the God that inspired the creation of this country, and in honor and respect ingratitude for all that country has given, asking nothing in return, the first step necessary to save it is on the shoulders of each of us to stand up, go to the polls, cast your vote, and kick out every one of the politicians that have spent the last two years doing everything they could to isolate themselves from us and destroy everything the rest of us have work for generations to uphold and defend.
