It is hard to imagine some of the behavior now considered part of the cultural standard in the Northern Hemisphere of our world—when a Supreme Court Jurist, to be confirmed has to admit “they” do not really know what makes a person a “woman;” or when children can decide their own gender and subsequently go “under the knife” to make their decision permanent without a grownup thought of the consequences; or when a male criminal can claim to be a woman and is allowed a bed in a woman’s prison to rape and impregnate “real” women; or when a university education is more about gender studies than natural science and where young minds go not to be broadened but to be indoctrinated!
Does anyone wonder what gramma thinks of all this?
Not to speak disparaging of what we might call “civilized” behavior but I am wondering if the aliens have not already landed and are among us. We no longer have a cultural identity as a people. It seems. There is no longer a common dream we might all call reasonable. Is it unreasonable to go to church—anymore? Is it unreasonable to want to raise a family? Is it unreasonable to dream of the quiet life in which neighbors are neighborly and not splintered into a thousand disunited cliques in support of ideas as ephemeral as the morning dew.
Causes change but the result always seems to support division. It is as if a lasting “hate” was all that mattered where once their was community and caring. Life is no longer a matter of what I can offer but what I can get. It is not gratitude but entitlement that motivates the human heart—if indeed, we are still talking “human.”
Perhaps, we are learning something about the human soul. It is more malleable and susceptible to suggestion than some of us thought. Take me! I have learned through introspection how little I know myself. I look back over my youthful years and wonder how I could have been the way I was or say some of the things I said. I was then someone I would rather now deny I ever was! Am I the alien?! Perhaps, this is why Saint Paul wrote in his letter to the Christians at Rome, “I want to do what is good, but I don’t. I don’t want to do what is wrong, but I do it anyway” – Romans 7:19 NLT. (Turns out: this is a favorite scripture anymore among Christians!)
Will our nation awake one morning and shamefully regret what it has done? Will we rewrite the history to sound like it once was in gramma’s day. Yes, they had their “sins.” They made their mistakes. They even, in America, amended the National Constitution in 1919 to outlaw beer. (They called it “intoxicating liquors.” What alcoholic beverage isn’t!) All this only to amend it back into the document in 1933, a mere 14 years later, realizing that, during a depression and a pending global conflict, everyone needs a “happy hour.”
Or, just maybe, they discovered—as with a person, so it is with a society—that you cannot legislate away behavior or snatch it violently and thoughtlessly from its moorings without severe sociological or cultural consequences.
This is why it seems easier for me—for one—to imagine that there are aliens among us, even if we cannot know who’s who. Perhaps, many of us will one morning awaken and say, “I’m going back! I am so sorry, I don’t know why I did that!” And the others of us will welcome them home!
