Dear Editor
Sorry for this, but it must be said. It’s time for us all to extract our heads from our posteriors and wake to what we’re doing to ourselves.
I’m reminded of a yearlong commitment to our nation — and yes, you, if you call yourself American — more than a half-century ago. While the greatest physical threat I faced from “the enemy” was a few usually defective rockets being lobbed into our base, abuse of hard drugs was becoming ever more prevalent among my fellow GIs during my deployment.
I was threatened with a butcher knife by one drug-crazed buddy, but what has been seared into my memory was another intelligent, college-educated young friend who, the last time I saw him, had been reduced to an empty husk of his former self. It was as if his very soul had been sucked out of him. I’ve prayed many times over the years that he was able to recover from that soul-destroying addiction. I’ll never know.
What does that have to do with today? Now? Our country? Our communities?
Our present pushers’ “drug ochoice” is clear: distract, frighten, stir anger, fill our eyes, ears, and minds with bizarre conspiracy theories, have us paint our neighbors as “other,” whether brown, black, feminist, LGBTQ, “woke,” BLM, Antifa, “communist,” socialist, left-winger, illegal, rapist, gang member, protester, agitator, insurrectionist, anti-Christian. The more we fall for it, the more we ignore and accept what they do to those they would have us “other.”
And the more we ignore what they are doing to every one of us — destroying our compassion, slicing, dicing, and finally pureeing our very grasp of responsibility, ethics, and morality, zombifying us so they can seize our earnings and potential earnings, our rights, our freedoms, and not only our beautiful nation’s wealth, but our very moral heritage as Americans.
But what I think of as I gaze at the mindless, farcical drivel increasingly being purveyed in our media — and even our churches — and virtually every day as I walk among my neighbors and friends and see them not only passively accepting it, but too often needily, greedily sucking it in, is that poor young friend 50 years ago in a hootch in southeast Asia who had his very soul extracted from him.
And the mutual irony just dawned on me. He — and we — are doing it to ourselves.
Name Witheld by Writer's Request
Perryville
