Green Nails, Red Nails

I was at the supermarket the other day and the young man working at the checkout had green fingernails. I noticed my four-year-old looking at his hands as I was taking my items out of the cart, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask why his nails were that color. As it happens, she was more interested in the "paid" stickers he was putting on our milk cartons (kids love stickers!). It's just as well. Because the answer that came into my mind in that moment was, "Because his country failed him." Probably wouldn't have gone over very well.

We're everything the Left says we are--but for exactly the opposite reasons. They accuse us of brainwashing our kids, when our real guilt is failing to brainwash our kids: because when they say "brainwashing," they mean teaching them basic, fundamental morality and basic, fundamental biology. They accuse us of building a culture of hate, when our real guilt is failing to build a culture of hate: because what they mean by "hate" is simply standing our ground against a cult of perverted lust. And because of our failure, that cult is now snarling and straining at the leash to impose its perversions on our children at a younger and ever-younger age.

Remember that every heresy is founded on a truth! It becomes heretical when it isolates whatever truth it's fixated on from the breadth and balance of all the other truths of the Faith. It becomes a Cyclops, while the Church is Argus Panoptes, the many-eyed Giant. (Remember, too, that the myths of men are often echoes of the Truth of God: for instance, Ezekiel's vision of the angels as many-eyed wheels tends to corroborate the Panoptic glimpses given to the imaginations of pre-Christian but still virtuous heathen poets like Virgil). Arius was right to revere the Father but wrong to forget the Son; Nestor was wise to venerate Christ, True God, but foolish to neglect Jesus, True Man. The Donatists insisted keenly on strength and purity among priests, but myopically overlooked the Supreme Priesthood of Christ; the Protestants humbly cling to the need for faith but arrogantly push aside the need for good works.

In the same way, the tenets of the Left have sprung from honorable sources, not unlike the well-meant Communist (over)reaction to Tsarist oppression before them. Our country did indeed treat women and minorities abominably. It is absolutely a good thing that such sins are now recollected with detestation. The disaster--the almost inevitable overswing of the non-self-correcting pendulum of history--is that we've now forgotten that these selfsame things have happened everywhere, at every age, since Eden's cherub ignited his flaming sword. For the Left to speak as though America is the only country that ever perpetrated human slavery, for example, is unutterably ludicrous. And it has long since passed the point of innocent error. Even the best and most Christ-centered movements imaginable can all too easily be twisted to serve the Enemy. For pity's sake, look at the Jesuits.

The Devil has already had his due; and, given an inch, has taken a country mile. Ordinary people are finally pushing back, thank God, and a great awakening from the nightmare of the Woke may be at hand. Let's pray and be vigilant this Lent!