Courage and Cancellation

Before I forget them, here are just a few things that popped into my aging brain this morning on the drive home after Mass. I had some errands to run — fill the car with gas, buy milk and cream — so my mind was wonderfully empty and open to deeper thoughts. I’d considered praying the Rosary as I drove but knew I wouldn’t have time to complete five decades and I never like stopping in the middle…so my attention wandered.

I found myself thinking about a young woman, born in North Korea, who ultimately escaped via China, Mongolia, South Korea, and finally to the United States. I had seen her interviewed on TV the other day, and her courage and wisdom overwhelmed me. In China she and her mother were forced into sex slavery, but she managed to escape, crossed the Gobi Desert into Mongolia, and from there made her way to South Korea. She came to the USA and eventually graduated from Columbia, a university where she encountered a woke American version of the forced leftist orthodoxy she thought she had left behind in North Korea. Her name is Yeonmi Park, and she’s written two books: one about her escape, In Order to Live; and another, While Time Remains. The latter relates her experiences dealing with leftist political indoctrination here in the United States, especially in Academia. She is a remarkable and courageous young woman, and I have ordered both books. I might write about them in a future post. 

Listening to her, though, led me to consider the lack of moral courage, indeed the outright cowardice of so many Americans, especially young college-age Americans. They seem so afraid of being out of sync with the current zeitgeist, so afraid to speak up in defense of truth and what is right, that they succumb to social and psychological pressures, and to the fear of “cancellation”, believing or at best not daring to contradict whatever lies they are told. Because they have been so thoroughly indoctrinated at every educational level, they find if far easier to let others think for them rather than taking the time to study, to learn the truth, and perhaps even to think for themselves. When I consider our young service men and women, who exhibit remarkable physical and moral courage almost daily, I am appalled by the moral cowardice of far too many of the “more educated” among our youth. 

Of course, the indoctrination of our children and young adults plays right into the hands of those who seek to rule us. The young folks are so accustomed to believing everything they are told by their controllers, that the chosen rulers can claim infallibility, even in the face of failure. An abject failure that turns into a deadly fiasco — for example, Afghanistan — is hailed as a huge success and the woke media and party-lime politicians just rave about it. And the more such things occur, the more often truth is hidden behind lies, the more the workers and drones in the hive actually come to believe what they’re saying. 

The only solution is to speak the truth always, regardless of the consequences. That’s really the best definition of moral courage.

More thoughts…

Just some more spontaneous thoughts that come to me as I sit for four hours in a very uncomfortable chair waiting for dentists to finish their work on Dear Diane. These dentists at the University of Florida are a wonderful, competent team of professionals, and the long sessions have taught me how to deal with what promises to be hours of near fatal boredom. Interestingly — and why it’s interesting will become evident shortly — Diane’s dentists earned their undergraduate degrees abroad.

My subject today probably came about because I’m sitting in a building in Gainesville, Florida surrounded by other buildings of this major university. Perhaps these thoughts penetrated my aging brain through a kind of osmosis. Anyway, here goes…

Parents today, who pay huge amounts of money for their child to attend an Ivy League college, or really almost any college or university, are throwing their money away. Our colleges and universities, sadly with only a few exceptions, have completely abandoned their role as institutions of higher education. Not too many years ago colleges and universities actually educated their undergraduate students, providing them with a firm foundation in the “liberal arts.” Students learned to express themselves orally and in writing, to understand our place in the history of humanity, to become acquainted with the philosophies that formed that history, to recognize the greatness and the weakness in the lives and work of those who came before, to grasp the fundamentals of mathematics and science, and to appreciate the world’s great literature and art. This liberal education provided students with the knowledge and skills needed to live productive lives in a free society and prepared them for further professional education or specialized training in a variety of fields. In other words, they learned to think and to reason, and to do so with discernment.

Russell Kirk (1918-1994), the great conservative thinker, wrote that liberal education “defends order against disorder…works for order in the soul and order in the republic. Liberal learning enables those who benefit from its discipline to achieve some degree of harmony within themselves.” And St. John Henry Newman (1801-1890) stated that through a liberal intellectual discipline “a habit of mind is formed which lasts through life, of which the attributes are freedom, equitableness, calmness, moderation, and wisdom, of what…I have ventured to call the philosophical habit of mind.” 

But today, many of our colleges and universities have completely abandoned liberal education and instead have devolved into mere indoctrination centers where young minds, already preconditioned by the ideological garbage they’ve been force fed in many high schools, become thoroughly radicalized. Lacking a real education, college students instead become Lenin’s “useful idiots” who can easily be led and controlled by those who seek power. With breathless adoration too many of today’s students unquestioningly accept whatever their radical professors tell them, and zombie-like they follow their handlers into the streets. By the time they graduate, useless degrees in hand, they despise the civilization that allows them to express the hatred they’ve been taught. 

Most parents, however, don’t have a clue and will continue to fund this first phase of societal suicide. Their children may be “woke,” but parents are the ones who need to wake up. Unfortunately too many have been willing to abdicate their responsibility for the education of their children and willingly allow others to teach their children to hate not only their nation and Western Civilization, but also the parents who foot the bill for all this.

What other options do parents and their children have? Maybe I’ll offer a few off-the-wall ideas about this soon in a future post…assuming I remember to do so.