Waking up in an American nightmare

I woke up this morning expecting to smell the aroma of bacon wafting from the kitchen and my mother's voice calling me to "get ready for school." I expected to see my homework (arithmetic and spelling) already done and my Mighty Mouse lunchbox nearby. But sixty years have passed since I was eleven, and I am mortified to see what has become of the America I knew, the America where Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best were two of the most popular television shows, where the raciest jokes on air were only hinted at by a slyly grinning Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life.

I remember waiting at the school bus stop where the sleaziest boys spoke in profanities — but cleaned up their act as soon as the first girls approached. That was back when even the sleaze-bags actually had manners. Today, I saw a televised news report about the Democratic Party's top politicians. The screen was covered with the pictures of about twenty of them, including one with a college degree in economics who has not the slightest clue as to how wealth is created; a radical Islamist, anti-American Jew-hater who in her childhood was rescued from abject circumstances but now hates us; and a foul-mouthed congresswoman who publicly used a vile obscenity to threaten the president. All the pictures constituted a rogue's gallery of socialist, communist no-borders advocates, of liars, tax cheats, and authoritarian would-be dictators who despise ordinary working Americans. I awoke today in a world that not even George Orwell could have seriously predicted. It is a world where sexual virtues are ridiculed, while sexual perversions are publicly celebrated; where freedom of speech is redefined as the shouting down of conservative viewpoints; where the nonexistent right not to be offended overrides the constitutional right of free speech; where violent illegal aliens are bussed into neighborhoods far from the gated communities of those who bus them. It is a world where every event is interpreted by propagandist impostors (posing as journalists) in the worst possible light, for example to condemn teenage high school boys who were accosted by bigoted leftists and who responded with courtesy and restraint. One of the boys was accused by an interviewer, who equated his standing still with a form of aggression. There are climatologists who soberly analyze the facts of climate change, without supporting the radical leftist proposal of confiscating your property to (somehow) cool the Earth. Those climatologists are called "deniers," a veiled synonym for Nazis, and have been threatened with revocation of their professional licenses. One wonders how it is that a nation supposedly governed by constitutional principles could have fallen under the boot of those who so brazenly defy those principles — but that question was answered a long time ago. "Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." —John Adams