O Lord, thou hast been our refuge in every generation…
-Psalm 91
It’s an easy thing to give up. People today don’t believe in anything. Kids have no respect. To me, far more dangerous than that vague respect older people talk about—kids have no self respect, no self love. They seek it anywhere or they seek oblivion. No one believes in anything anymore. Not even themselves. It is a very dark synopsis and we wail for the good old days. No one has the values they used to, people treat each other like objects now. Just look how we use each other.
Anyone who says such a thing needs a brief survey course in history. There is more of Jim Crow, lynchings, interment camps and slavery than there is apple pie. Women bleeding in back alleys and men battered to death for loving each other, convents full of nuns set to flames because they were Papists and not Protestants fill the pages of our good old days.
There was a statement found from a while ago lamenting the loss of innocence and virtue in youth, of how the world was going to nihilism long before it could make the trip to hell in a handbasket. I look around at the people I love and lament those things too. But this statement was found on clay in Egypt over four thousand years ago. Every generation has its struggles. In every age things seem to be at an end and yet we persist. Goodness, light, virtue, remain. It just seems that sometimes it’s news to us that we have to struggle a little to get them.
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