The Bigger Picture

Americans have taken a series of gut punches this year between Covid-19, the resulting shutdowns, and now the rioting. We aren't talking protests any longer, we are talking insurrection. 

Rioters in Chicago who trashed the highland Miracle Mile stores like Coach, Gucci, Apple, etc., said their booty was "reparations." For what - living in Chicago? Then we have Portland. Remember how the riots were going to go away after the Feds"provoking it" went away? Yeah, right. People have already been shot in Seattle and stabbed in Portland and it is likely this will be happening with more frequency. Right now it's ball bearings, frozen water bottles, and lasers, but the guns will come out and there will be blood.

These are not rioters, they are terrorists, and terrorists always have a political goal in mind. Dennis Prager looks at this bigger picture in a column today that lays it out well. Essentially, you have competing religions based on antithetical worldviews. 

The West was founded on a Judeo-Christian worldview: there is a God, man is made in His image and that is the basis for "unalienable rights" for all, regardless of race, creed  or color. Government is necessary to restrain evil since man has fallen, but it should be limited to allow free men to flourish.

Leftism denies there is a God. We are free to shape a perfect society of utopian goodness and government is seen as the agent to accomplish this. No existing society lives up to this perfect utopia and therefore must be demolished by any means necessary to usher in the Age of the Perfection. It is this religious faith that somewhere out there, the perfect society is possible, despite all the failed attempts like the USSR, Red China, Nazi Germany. It explains why the stock retort to people pointing out this inconvenient fact is always, "It has never really been tried." It must exist or my life is meaningless. 

Europe lost its faith in God in WWI and WWII finished off any residue. Prager points out that they had seen the dangers of fanaticism and became, "... more preoccupied with working less, traveling more and being taken care of than with ideological movements." He says that, "One might say that Europe was inoculated against fanaticism." Not so this country, although the secular Left was already hard at work undermining the the intellectual underpinnings of the American heritage. Like locusts swarming across the African continent destroying everything in their path, the Left has nearly completed its long march through American institutions toward a universal secularist understanding of man and the only objective left is the destruction of the current order and the rise of the Perfect State. To make it worse, unlike Europe, we have not been inoculated against fanaticism by the experience of two world wars that shattered them, and that fanaticism is what we are seeing in American cities right now. 

Benjamin Franklin was asked what kind of a government the founders had created in Philadelphia.He replied, "A republic, if you can keep it." Unless Americans wake up and act to keep it, I am afraid that the republic is going to be tossed on the ash heap of history and we will join all those serfs in fear of the State that have gone before us and exist in much of the world today. 

townhall.com/columnists/dennisprager/2020/08/11/why-america-is-in-real-danger-n2574078