An article in The Resurgent titled Defending Your Values In A Sea of The Absurd describes how my life feels these days. It describes what it is like to swim in the cesspool of popular culture at work or school:

Thus in only the past three weeks, around the water cooler, in the breakroom, or in the school cafeteria, you have been forced to actually debate the following:

  • Whether grown men should use the restroom with little girls.
  • If a child’s life is life is more valuable than a gorilla’s.
  • And whether or not your Scriptural views on marriage caused an Islamic extremist you never heard of prior to last week to abide by the teachings of his local mosque and slaughter people.

And those are only the top three from very recent history. Interacting with people of the extreme left has been a constant journey through the looking glass for generations.

The statement is certainly true for me. The sad and surprising thing is that I have been caught in these kinds of discussions at church, too. I have to admit I have been discouraged about that to a certain extent, but it dawned on me that while these kinds of attitudes are ubiquitous in the West (the “world” West, not just the American West), there are many places with much less economic and educational opportunity where political and religious liberty are restricted that those attitudes do not hold. I think of China and Africa in particular. It is easy to despair and think the end is near. Maybe that is true, but maybe other parts of the world are ascending in the spiritual sense as America and the rest of the West decline. I hope that is true just as I hope that America turns things around.

Update: Right after I posted this article, I read the following from here, h.t. Bayou Renaissance Man). Seems precisely right.

The Hillary apologists are right about one thing, you know: It really is time to move on – not from Hillary scandals, which are evergreen, but from holding out any hope for any part of the political class. We need to stop waiting for somebody on high to make us more free, and work on building our own individual freedom in a deliberately unfree world.