We’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve forgotten who we’ve been called to be. We’ve forgotten the privilege of having the liberties that were handed down to us by people who sacrificed for those liberties in ways that make our abuse of them shameful and inexcusable. We’ve abandoned all that is good in a thoughtless trade-off for all that is not. Oh yes. We’ve forgotten.
Lesser Agendas
We’ve become engrossed in political panhandling and party posturing. We’ve immersed ourselves self-serving agendas and self-aggrandizing policies. We’ve run roughshod over the ethics and morals that granted our society any sense of civility, that preserved a respect for our shared humanity, that kept our lesser selves subservient to our better selves, that kept the malignancy of injustice pinned under the sure and steady arm of justice, and that repeatedly kept the evil of tyranny at bay. We’ve blindly and arrogantly crushed truth because it has no qualms about pointing out our ignorance, or calling out our selfishness, or rendering the toxicity of our greed exposed, or demanding the surrender of the evil that we use as a means of pleasuring ourselves.
Blinded
We have been blinded. We’ve been blinded to everything that made us great as a nation, and in doing so we have set a sure and certain course that will lead directly and decisively to our own destruction. We’ve forgotten who we are. We’ve forgotten who we’ve been called to be. We’ve forgotten.
And until we refuse to stoop to the duplicity of political panhandling, until we refuse to allow party posturing to be the stuff that defines our legacy, until we refuse to be self-seduced slaves to our self-serving agendas, until we refuse to be duped by the arrogance of our self-aggrandizing policies, until we are sufficiently brave to step up and restore the ethics and morals that will demand everything of us, until we reinstate truth despite what it is certain to reveal about us…until we do all of that, we will continue to forget who we are, and who we’ve been called to be. And the consequence of that kind of forgetfulness is irreversible.
Rejecting Foolishness
And should we be foolish enough to think that we can forget those things and somehow survive the forgetting (or even somehow flourish in it), we as a nation will perish in our foolishness. Our time as a nation will be no more. And should we believe that forgetting doesn’t matter, that these permissive behaviors will somehow build a greater nation, if we are foolish enough to believe any of that, we will eventually find ourselves standing in the ashes of who we used to be, and we will find ourselves willing to do anything to undo the horror of what we will have done. But the greatest horror of all is that at that point, it will be too late to do anything.
And so, let’s not forget who we are, and let’s not forget who we’ve been called to be. Let’s not forget before it becomes too late to forget.
- Craig D. Lounsbrough
Craig Lounsbrough
M. Div., LPC