Are You Woke?

Do you have an uneasy sense that something isn’t right? Like a shadow that you catch in the corner of your eye. You thought you saw something move, but when you look for it, nothing is there. Like you’ve walked into a room and suddenly realize there are no windows and you feel like the door is silently being closed behind you. What is it?

With all the noise of the news that isn’t, it’s difficult to turn down the volume enough to tune into the truth. Do we even know what that is anymore? Who are we as a people, as Americans? What does that mean? What ideals and principles do we truly hold in common? Are there any? Have the few elites so divided us that we find ourselves on the other side of the looking glass as E Unum Pluribus (Out of One, Many)?

Have we so lost our way that China’s vision of “Harmony under Heaven” sounds appealing? Have we forgotten that China is a Communist country or what communism is? Who has erased our collective memory of the death and destruction wrought by a political ideology that brought us to the brink of extinction in the 20th Century?

Are you woke?

Our nation was once a shining beacon of hope in a world gone mad–set aside “perfection,” no person or nation has, is or will be–but it seems we have been touched. Dallas Willard once said that “Civilization is a thin veneer over a heaping cauldron of violence.” And that veneer gets thinner with each passing day where we tear down the institutions painstakingly built upon the twin pillars of our civilization’s foundation–Faith and Family. Did you just snicker at that? Do you know why? Stop for a moment if you did and realize you’ve been infected, probably without consciously knowing it.

Are you woke?

Not to the latest grievance used to stoke racial divide; not to a Trump tweet endlessly decried; not to the obvious nature of man and woman denied. We used to be a serious nation, that grappled with serious things–Rights from men or from God; Slave or Free; Fascism, Nazism, Communism or Freedom. Versus today where our pattycake nation has a baker man being prosecuted in the highest court in the land.

Are you woke?

Our lives and the lives of our children depend upon it. Wake soon slumbering America, before that which you sense becomes all too real.