OPINION:
“Enough prayers. Time for some action.” So said President Biden in the White House Rose Garden April 8, 2021, announcing his plans to address the situation of guns in America.
No, Mr. President, there have not been enough prayers. First, prayer is an action. But if we all, all Americans, had been praying for our country — or even for ourselves — establishing ongoing contact with God for the last 60 years we would not be in the situation we have today. You see, what you call “gun violence” is primarily a spiritual problem not a political problem. We see the results of our spiritual malaise everywhere we look.
We are faced with this tragic crisis as we see it in the African-American population of our society. Liberal programs in the 1960s tore the Black family apart giving rewards via welfare if a father wasn’t in the home. The strongholds of the Black community up till then was the family, and the Black families were united around the Black churches. This system was devastated by welfare programs which became the new basis of Black culture.
Mr. Biden said, “The violence is hitting Black and brown communities the hardest. Homicide is the leading cause of death of Black boys and men ages 15 to 34 — the leading cause of death.”
I’ve got another stat for you, Joe, about the deaths of Black people in our country. It comes from Jason Riley in the Wall Street Journal of July 10, 2018: “In New York City, thousands more black babies are aborted each year than born alive each year, and the abortion rate among black mothers is more than three times higher than it is for white mothers
“Nationally, black women terminate pregnancies at far higher rates than other women as well. In 2014, 36% of all abortions were performed on black women, who are just 13% of the female population. The little discussed flip side of ‘reproductive freedom’ is that abortion deaths far exceed those via cancer, violent crime, heart disease, AIDS and accidents…
“The more plausible explanation may have to do with marriage. Unmarried women are more likely to experience an unintended pregnancy, and black women are less likely than their white, Asian and Hispanic counterparts to marry. It’s true that many of these would-be partners are sitting in prison, but it’s also true that this racial divide in marriage, which started in the 1960s and has grown ever since, predates the ‘mass incarceration’ of black men that took off in the 1980s.”
With the chaos bequeathed to them by liberal policies it is no surprise when young men who avoided being aborted end up getting shot by a police officer. There is so much that can go wrong when a young Black man is arrested especially if he panics and tries to run or fight the police. In all these celebrated cases the young men were shot as they tried to struggle or run away instead of complying with the officer. This is not to blame the victim because the victim is everybody. This includes all of Western Civilization.
No, we have not had enough prayers, Mr. Biden. We need many, many more to get out of the cesspool of violence and death large parts of our society has become. The barbarian is at the gate. The barbarian is at the gate in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, he spent the summer in Minneapolis, Portland, Seattle, New York, all places where crime has skyrocketed after the foolish and suicidal idea of “defund the police.”
The barbarian is at the gate in the form of cancel culture, political correctness, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, in the left-wing mainstream media, critical race theory, Marxist indoctrination in academia, and on and on.
And yes, attacks on the Second Amendment. What the left doesn’t understand (or perhaps does understand) is that the Founders established the Second Amendment specifically as a check against a rogue government coming to power to exercise control and exercise tyranny over the citizenry. That rogue government is the barbarian at the gates grasping for power and control over the United States. In Nazi Germany gun registration led to gun confiscation which led to an easy take-over which led to the Holocaust. The Second Amendment is a guard against tyranny. A tyranny which is on the rise in America.
Western Civilization no doubt will be called “white supremacy” by critics, but it contains all the methods of achieving the justice they claim to want. And everything they destroy is a part of their solution that they are blinded to. They should study the American Founders instead of trying to tear down their statues. As C.S. Lewis would say, they are sawing off the branch on which they sit.
Yes, we do need action, but action first guided by prayer. If you are a believer in Western Civilization and don’t pray, start.
“If my people who are called by my name humble themselves, and pray and seek my face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land.” — 2 Chronicles, 7:14
• John Mallon is former contributing editor of Inside the Vatican magazine, His website may be found at http://johnmallon.LIFE.
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