by Peter Falkenberg Brown
Who will stand to save America? Will you stand? Will your friends and family stand? Will your neighbors, your pastors, your teachers, your leaders step into the breach? Who will stand?
The men and women who gave their lives to birth and nurture the noblest experiment of freedom in the history of the world are now aghast. They stare down at a country that is pockmarked and diseased with a spiritual plague that has eaten away at America’s founding vision of freedom for all. It was a dream that at one time gave hope to millions of people who are now adrift, unable to trust what once was a shining city on a hill.
How good is America now? America has been described as exceptional because the goodness of her people flourished in the rich soil of her founding. America was created with prayer and faith and an ardent conviction that freedom for all will always be a God-given right. In spite of the imperfections of her citizens, America grew and blessed the world because she was created with a spine of nobility, of compassion, and of righteousness.
That righteousness and spirit of self-sacrifice led three-hundred thousand white men, joined by forty-thousand of their black brothers, to give their lives to end the scourge of slavery and to advance the reality that all humans are created equal. America grew and advanced, until in 1991 the black professor Orlando Patterson, of Harvard University, stated that America “. . . is now the least racist white-majority society in the world.”2
But now, America is crippled. Her vision is clouded, and she is crawling, unable to rise, pressed down by accusations from forces that yearn for her death. Her house has been malevolently divided, with too many of her citizens convinced that she has never been good, never great, and is not worth saving.
Her body politic has been attacked with vitriol and propaganda for so many decades that many of her children look upon her with scorn, unaware that those who vilify her seek to replace her with tyranny. The tragedy of America is that good people grew distracted and failed to guard the battlements of their castle. They prospered, worked hard, and served the world but were unaware of the viciousness of the barbarians who lived within their gates.
Vladimir Lenin declared, “Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.”3 America’s children have been taught to hate America for decades, and now too many of them are utterly convinced that America must be fundamentally transformed. The question, of course, is “transformed into what?” The answer to that question has become shockingly clear in 2020 and 2021, with the rise of totalitarian mandates that few expected.
Where are we now, and where are we headed?
It’s time to go to the mountain top and look down at the world and America with the perspective of the ages. Human history has been bloody and tragic and dark, with most of the world ground down by poverty, disease, ignorance, and constant war. Slavery and tyranny were and are the norm, not the exception. Even now, life is still brutal for millions of people around the world.
Hundreds of thousands of people are enslaved in African countries, from young girls kidnapped into sex slavery by Islamic terror groups like Boko Haram to countries like the Islamic Republic of Mauritania in Northwest Africa, which enslaves around seventeen percent of its citizens, although it will not admit that it does so.4
There are slaves, and then there are “slaves in all but name.” Millions are oppressed by dictatorships in Islamic countries like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. The Marxist regimes in North Korea, Cuba, and China have created the equivalent of country-wide gulags. Even in the West, free speech is in severe decline, and the Covid pandemic has given governments the excuse to lock their people down.
For billions of people, life is still hell.
When we turn to America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, we see young people living in luxury with cell phones, flat-screen televisions, and food in their stomachs. Yet, those same young people have no real conception of the misery of human beings around the world. Too many of them are pawns, pushed around an enormous chessboard by oligarchs who regard America as a prize to be won.
Consider the “State of the Union” in 2021. Our people have huddled in fear for almost two years, jockeyed to and fro by tyrannical health officials, locked down, and masked. Our economy has been severely damaged and may be entirely crushed by nationwide vaccine passports that will prevent half the country from shopping and conducting business. As the conservative radio host Wayne Allyn Root recently wrote:
No more tourists from Texas or Florida, places with millions of unvaccinated citizens, where vaccine mandates are forbidden by law. Just those two states together have 50 million citizens. That’s millions of potential tourists never again coming to NYC, LA, San Fran and New Orleans.5
America, the erstwhile beacon of hope for the world, has left Afghanistan in defeat and disgrace, demonstrating to the world that her spine of bravery and righteousness has dissolved into sludge.
Hong Kong was abandoned, and Taiwan may be next. An emboldened China is in a position to win a hot war with America but has an even better chance of dominating America’s leaders and institutions with nothing more than bribes and the hint of violence.
Orthodox Islamic Sharī‘ah law and jihad have flooded into Great Britain and Europe on the backs of millions of Muslim migrants who have no desire to defend Western values. The good-hearted Muslims who do appreciate freedom are vastly outnumbered and afraid for their lives and thus are mostly silent and ineffective. America, the “Great Satan,” is also falling under the influence of Islamic totalitarianism, with the rise of spurious “anti-Islamophobia” propaganda.
The hypocrisy of the American Left is massive in regards to Islam. They care not a whit about the fate of Afghan women enslaved by the Taliban, but at home insist on the separation of church and state, unless it involves Islam, which can never, ever be criticized. Thus, American freedoms are now attacked by a “Red-Green” alliance of the Marxist Left and the Green flag of totalitarian Islam.
Being attacked is painful but not necessarily fatal. Even when it is fatal, and death awaits, as it did for the Spartans at the battle of Thermopylae and the brave defenders of the Alamo, at least one can die with honor. Better yet, we want to win, as declared by General George S. Patton when he told his men:
We are advancing constantly . . . Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy.6
America is at the edge and possibly at the point of death. The forces attacking her are confident that they have already won and are cheering her demise as they contemptuously enact increasingly tyrannical decrees that oppress the patriots who remain faithful to the vision of freedom created by God.
Some of those patriots languish as political prisoners in Washington while black-clad Antifa terrorists roam free. Thousands of patriots are being deplatformed and censored by Big Tech totalitarians. Half the country is smeared every day, in the media, as evil, hateful, irredeemable white supremacists—even when, as is the case with Candace Owens and Larry Elder, their skin is black.
To counter the illness destroying America, we must be brave, and we must stand. We cannot be silent. We must speak out, speak up, and defend freedom and the ethics of sacred love that produced that freedom. We must push back against falsehood and run forward with the standard of truth. Truth really is on our side.
The best outcome for America is peace—peace that is established by the changing of hearts and minds, by the renewing of our spirits, by the revitalization of our love that is nourished by the spirit of God. Peace is our hope, rather than war, rather than the devastation produced by violent conflict. We must avoid violence, if we can, and do our best to reach our American brothers and sisters and persuade them that the standards of American freedoms are the only hope for the world, for America, and for each of them.
If God did not exist, we might quail in front of the darkness that seeks to overwhelm America. It would seem too hard, too hopeless, too easy to say that all is lost already.
But we cannot quail, for God does indeed exist, and millions upon millions of Americans depend on us. Billions of people around the world depend on us and need a Free America to survive and prosper for centuries to come.
For that cause, for freedom, for love, and for God, we will stand, and we will advance.
peterbrown@worldcommunity.com
https://peterfalkenbergbrown.com
