A Matter of Faith

Photo Courtesy of my Friend Liberalguy

I imagine to an outsider, it must look like America’s two halves — the Right and the Left — are locked in an interminable battle of Zoroastrian proportion. But, if you are a born and bred American, such as myself, you know better: it wasn’t always this way, nor is it that way now. Many a cultural study indicates we Americans have more in common than not — that we’re very much in sync on a great many issues. Where does all this hostility come from? In Culture Wars as Far as the Eye Can See, Jonah Goldberg makes this point:

The Left, since the 1960s, has been the aggressor in the culture war. Liberals often object when conservatives point this out, but they brag about it amongst themselves. They are, after all, the “agents of change,” “forces of progress,” “enemies of the status quo,” etc. And when they meet resistance to the wheel of history or efforts to roll it back, they scream “culture war!”

In my youth I watched adults argue such things as Social Security, careful not to impugn the memory of our Dear Sainted FDR. Once you took his name in vain, all bets were off, but if you avoided overt iconoclasm, people argued about the proper role of government, which Goldberg summarizes as follows:

The expansion of the size and role of government in this legislation is in and of itself a cultural issue. As we’ve been discussing around here quite a bit, part of America’s exceptional nature is that we do not look to the state for help the way many other countries do.

For years I had a slight resentment against Rush Limbaugh because I thought he should be accentuating the similarities over the differences but, looking back, it would have made no difference anyway. Throughout the Clinton years, my “warm fuzzy liberal” friends attacked the memory of Reagan; attacked Limbaugh; attacked everything that I believed in. Not long after that great Hurrah, they cranked up the Global Warming hysteria, which my friend Bayonet so righteously skewers — on a daily basis. And then came Bush 43. They slavered at the bit every morning to attack that poor man, simply for being alive — literally! I finally threw up my hands in the face of these hostilities and asked, ‘Where did the Center go?’

Where has the Center gone? Perhaps it was never there? That is the real question America faces. Unfortunately, it won’t be resolved through reason. It will be determined by Fate.

And Faith, for the “progressive” has faith in That Hideous Strength, while the old fashioned conservative, such as myself, has no problem yielding his will over to a Higher Power. I have no need to play God. Or to act like a snot. Or to run down my country.

That’s how it is. That’s where we are. Where it ends, only the Philistine knows.