“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”
~Abraham Lincoln
I mentioned in my last article that I was raised to hate America. Mainly, it wasn’t my parents who trained me to be a Radical Leftist; it was the liberal culture of America itself. This was before the internet became a centerpiece of our daily lives. It was mainly public school in a swing state, and the liberal news my parents watched that subtlety but consistently emphasized messages that America is a bully trying to police the world. We were told America is the first in the Western world to incarcerate its own people and one of the last in the Western world in terms of healthcare outcomes (related to healthcare spending), that Americans use up far more than their fair share of resources, and so on.
The goal, it seems, wasn’t just to turn Americans against America but to turn the generations against one another. I grew to resent America because I was trained to believe that America was insatiable, racist, and wasteful. I became blind to the incredible abundance of resources, opportunities, and beauty that the country of my birth graciously offers. As a mid-thirties woman, I also became alienated from older generations who were raised to see the strength, generosity, and positive uniqueness of America. As I approached the end of high school and started college, I wrestled with career choices. I sought a career that would help me achieve the goal of helping the world heal from the sins my country committed; (as if America was the worst of all sinners in the history of the world.)
I wasn’t just trained to hate my country. I was trained to hate and fear the future: my generation was sent the not-so-subtle message that the planet was literally burning. Humanity — specifically big, greedy America — had lit the fire, and in order to atone for our mortal wounding of the planet, we needed to make ourselves as small as possible. I was told it was morally irresponsible to have children because I couldn’t guarantee them a livable planet when they reached adulthood. It wasn’t until just a few years ago that my eyes became opened to the fact that the language used in the environmental movement when speaking about humanity is genocidal. I was taught humans were a “cancer” or a “virus” on the planet; to save the planet, we needed to “reduce” our population by an extreme factor, but it was never clear who would get to decide who stays and who goes.
In college, the radicalization deepened. I was taught to repeat slogans like, “If you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention,” which has been shortened in recent years to “stay angry.” Ruining one’s health and relationships is the new political activism. Staying informed — and “staying angry” is the new virtue signaling. Instead of critical thinking, I was taught critical theory — that is, to criticize everything. In other words, to never let anything be good enough. Gratitude got relabeled as “toxic positivity.” Vengeance got redefined as “social justice.” It took me years to see this wholesale rewriting of the dictionary and the endless contradictions because the dismantling of traditional values and Western institutions has been hidden under the guise of moral urgency. It wasn’t just “more educated” to be Progressive; it was necessary if you wanted to be compassionate, do the right thing, and be a good person.
The unrest and disorientation we all feel in the culture right now is no accident. It has been intentionally sown and cultivated for years. Loving family and our country used to be virtues, as did personal responsibility and hard work; now, victimhood, negativity, and outrage have taken their place. The radicalization my generation went through when we were growing up took me years to see — and I’m still coming out of it and to my senses — but it is nothing like what the current generation of children is facing.
It’s taken decades to see the indoctrination of the Woke/Radical Leftist ideology for what it is. I’m still untangling the ways of thinking I was taught to practice my entire life. In my next article, I’ll share about the process of waking up and why it was so hard to do.
