America and Americans - Still Good

Echoes of Brushfires of Freedom: Just two days after posting the essay below, our friends at Townhall posted this gem: "Obama has Enraged the 'Citizen Class'". Good to see thought arouond the country is coalescing around truth.

Among the most deeply offensive actions of the Obama administration are the many ways in which it is denigrating, disparaging, and disputing the basic character of the American people. We are being whipped into a frenzy of divisiveness and doubt because of the constant drumbeat that ‘over there’ is a big subset of Americans who are greedy, intolerant, racist, bigoted and generally hateful (and of course, rich), while ‘over here’ are the pure, the open-minded, the selfless and the loving people of modest means who just need all the powers of government to keep control of those ‘over there’. If any of those ‘over there’ are allowed to have any power, America becomes a militaristic, imperialistic bully hated by all the world and provoking war and all manner of turmoil, just as it has throughout its history.

This Obama administration narrative is not America, and it is not a description of Americans. Americans as a whole are the most generous and compassionate people in the world; America is the most restrained and non-imperialistic superpower in the history of humanity; the American military has been a force for good like no other military ever has been; and the core American character is marked by a basic honesty and decency and good will toward others. There is a goodness about America and Americans that is known and felt throughout the country and the world.

All of that goodness is now being denied, smeared and besmirched on a daily basis by an American Presidency. It is a spectacle that leaves many of us feeling equal parts of shock, despair and anger; we’ve never seen anything like it and many of us still want to believe it’s not really happening or if it is, that it will surely stop soon. But it is happening, and it won’t stop because it is the product of a worldview that is supremely sure of itself, and is intoxicated with the belief that it can make the world adopt and conform to this worldview.

This worldview poses a supreme, gut-level check on Americans’ confidence in who they really are, and in what their country really stands for and has stood for since the time of its founding. Dig a little deeper, and it’s an all-out assault on our faith in God, and on our basic acceptance of the Bible’s oldest idea that man is made in God’s image and likeness, and its later idea that following Christ Jesus’ teachings will build our house on a rock that cannot be shaken down.

The worldview of Obama and the leftists is godless, or, rather, it is a view that man can be god and can make other men and women into the likeness of whatever it wants them to be, and that man can make up his own teachings about what shall or shall not be lasting. It is the essence of tyranny, as it has been in its various iterations throughout human history.

The worldview of Obama and the leftists is a lie. One of the surest ways to know it is a lie comes, again, from the time-tested wisdom of the Bible: “ye shall know them by their fruits”. Is anything good coming from what this administration is doing? Anything?

We’re not talking about some intellectual’s convoluted hypothetical definition of good. We’re not talking about some poor deluded soul who believes it is good that he has been made to think government is his unfailing nanny. We’re talking about the goodness in action and in people that is known and felt by the genuine warmth in the heart of the American character.

The answer is no; not one thing this administration is doing is making anyone feel a genuine sense and recognition of good. Sure, there may be power-hungry politicians who misidentify political wins as good, but that’s not the real thing. That’s the product of a soulless game; an ego trip.

The fruits of this administration are higher levels of class and racial animosity; increasing angst and anger among an ignored electorate; and a culture of freedom and free markets and responsibility turning into a culture of dependence, cynicism, and kleptocracy. None of it is good.

So the Obama worldview is all a lie, alright. The question is whether enough Americans who know it’s a lie will be worn down into believing they can’t fight it or beat it.

We don’t think so. Truth matters. America and Americans are good. They are not racist or bigoted or envious or hateful by nature; isolated examples of bad apples are simply the exceptions that prove the rule. But Americans are not good by accident of genetics or any particular ethnic ancestry; they are good because the distinctly American heritage that is in their blood—a nation founded on timeless, enduring principles that tie directly to the teachings of the Bible, including the gospel or ‘good news’ brought to humanity through Christ Jesus. These principles aren’t going anywhere, and they are never going to be replaced. They are true.

And so we’re confident Obama will ultimately find himself to be spitting into the wind. He is trying to jam a worldview lie down the throats of the American people. There may yet be some choking and indigestion to endure, but Americans are not going to swallow this lie. We know the truth about our nation and ourselves: America and Americans are good.

Paul Gable

May 21, 2010