3AM, I’ve been up since one. I went to bed at eleven. Mind wouldn’t still, and so I’m up. Not a bad dream, just thoughts that won’t leave and I wrest with them now alone.
I smoke a cigar, listen to the night, look out on lawn and street lamped road illumed past shadow of large maple. Close to porch an “almost laurel”—I don’t know what it really is—blooms in florets of dappled white that appear as shadow-hinted stars amidst green leaves blackened in night.
I’ve read in two books and will read into another, but right now—outside—I sit in darkness: only cigar and thoughts. I can hear the crickets, high hum from far off and cadence of another kind, lower and more broken, from single insect somewhere close.
I remember growing up and wondering why it was I was so blessed to be born in this time and life that I was gifted. Older now, unsettled in a thought, maybe I’m seeing answer.
I spoke with a friend this week on actions overseas. How, as broken as an oppressive regime may be, the people were even more broken, controlled and repressed and I wondered—how does anyone restore a life of freedom from coercion, force, and terror when conditioned and made low to such a state? Not a generation ago, they were liberal and free; and in seek of what was sold as greater liberty—unholy alliance of liberalism and Islamist—they lost all the liberties they had. Not a tale as old as time—but as old as Islam since its founding.
With reticence I see as world shows time and again—multiculturalism is a lie. A people can have a diverse culture when united in shared core commonalities; but where these are absent, and parallel cultures, brought into cross, there is no shared culture. There is no diverse culture. One will win. One will lose, likely erased from every page in history and written over by the victor.
Writing this, a cat screams. I hear it twice, and then quiet—killed and carried off by hunting owl of night. One has one. One has lost. In sign, God affirms the vision’s fear.
In the Marines, I was privileged to see many nations and cultures. With all its imperfections, it convinced me there is no greater nation or place than our own America. Islam is a unified, but oppressive culture. They do not love themselves. They do not love others. They create nothing but acquire by conquest and exhaustion. Our shaped history books blame European colonization for world’s slavery; but it was Moslems that ran the trade—and run it still today. Convert, submit, or die—there is no conciliation. Anywhere it touches other culture—there is war.
Why is the western world inclusive and conciliatory to what does not reciprocate? Is it our politics? Like Rome before its fall, does a liberal bent of endless grievance seek new citizens for power where it has exhausted and lost all allegiance among domestics it has perpetually promised and perpetually failed? Is it our materialist economy we mislabel “capitalism” that must seek always “more” to continue an ever increase of GDP and metrics of a system that is exhausting and not self-supporting or sustaining? Is it our Christian vestige, forever our foundation (until it’s not) of “love thy neighbor as thyself” that in relic of ideal we still practice as a principle for a people whose own foundation of faith is convert, submit (enslave), or kill.
Unrest in Europe—it is conflict of these divergent histories; histories we once were taught and how Islam was repelled and rid from near-total conquest. Forgetting, we invite them in—or uninvited, import them still; boundary lines and guarded fronts erased. The next war will not be on battlefields but in communities, door to door—just as Israel; Syria, Egypt, Iraq, and Libya when strong men were removed; the Sahel of Africa, the Philippines, the Baltics; anywhere they’ve ever gone and do not yet hold complete dominion and a full-oppression is established. It’s why churches burn after hundreds of years without incident until new neighbors arrive in seek of “refuge.” Its crimes are not prosecuted where footholds are established—nuclei of majority—where culture and people are erased.
We pretend to not see, like chickens when their neighbor’s neck is ringed before their eyes—“They must have done something…It won’t be me”—denial of the end-state awaiting every fowl, complacent and still caged.
In our complacency, cultural neglect to our history and religious roots of our whole culture, are we like the Israelites of ancient times—deserving and awaiting fore-coming enslavement and captivity? Will such be our salvation, losing all—having only our God and Christ remaining? Seven hundred years of captivity, when from our captors—becoming complacent too—we reemerge in Exodus from bondage into freedom once again?
I don’t know, but I worry.
Why did God gift me to be born in a time and place of such blessing and prosperity? Why have I lived the experiences I have? Perhaps it is to prophesy and proselytize so we—as people, nation, and culture—might sustain our blessings in the reassertion and bold-living of our faith so that we might avoid the repetition of a fate decided and brought about by our own indifference and neglect of God and Gift.
But if not, the Faith will remain—as before, so again—until freed again by God from condition of our enslavers.
Cigar is nearly gone. I still wrest upon the thought. I hope it is the first. I fear it is the last.
Multiculturalism is a lie. One will win, and one will lose.
I pray to God the Hope wins out.