Keep Right – Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
I am an extremist. I am proud to be an extremist. In my judgment, it is both right and good that I am an extremist. As we inhabit times pregnant with extreme risks, such dangers demand extreme solutions.
We face clear and present dangers that threaten the ongoing existence of contemporary human civilization. Without the many instrumentalities of trade, technology, and culture which Western ingenuity has wrought across the world, the vast majority of humanity will quickly die.
Without the checks and balances of the West’s naturally evolved enlightenment-inspired freedoms, artificial intelligences and those who are technologically savvy will steal creative autonomy from every individual outside their elite. Our fate would be as lobotomized drones in a totalitarian human hive.
Without loyalty from all parties and factions to the spirit and letter of our Constitution, our fifty American Republics and their Federal Union will descend into tyranny, anarchy, or a horrific fusion of both. The devolution of society in South Africa and/or the ubiquitous police state of North Korea awaits us, so long as increasing numbers of Americans detest our shared mainstream society.
Nothing less than our ongoing survival as free people is at stake. Our species teeters on the brink of the end of all life as we living Americans have known it. These are not normal times.
I take no pleasure in such musings. Not being an emotional adolescent, the thrill of danger no longer excites me. This is especially so when contemplating variant Armageddons.
No sane person, and no one with young or helpless loved ones, wants to apprehend such horror, at least not outside of a scary movie. I sympathize with those who just cannot abide such dark musings and retain their grip on any joy in life.
I have less sympathy for those whose vanity would never allow them to be caught seriously wondering about such matters. No one who cares for their social standing wants to appear to be a doom-crying nut-job. No one with ambitions to earn a place among life’s winners wants to appear so unfashionably pessimistic, so easily panicked.
No one who matters wants to be branded as an extremist. There is no profit in seeming to be so psychologically brittle as to jump to the conclusion that today’s problems are any different from those which our ancestors faced. They endured and triumphed through revolution, civil war, westward expansion, industrialization, depression, world wars, and cold war.
One can fairly ask why we can’t emulate their successes with some grace. Why must we put on sackcloth and ashes and imagine that our moment might constitute the actual end times? What really makes our shared moment fraught with so much peril?
The short answer: we are not the same.
Since World War I, the Western world has been engaged in a struggle against cultural suicide. Increasing proportions of our best and brightest elites have abandoned Judeo-Christian faith and embraced Marxism-by-any-other-name. This betrayal of tradition has over the past century has deteriorated every institution of culture within our civilization.
Neither church organizations nor government bureaus, civic associations nor trade unions, business enterprises nor media endeavors, artistic avant-gardes nor family structures serve any longer to bolster the common good of common people.
Most schools and universities are utterly hostile to the American variant of western civilization. Far too many teachers and professors work to indoctrinate innocents without fairly educating them in the ways of a free people.
Without a common understanding of what constitutes freedom, without a prevalent belief in constitutional liberty and Judeo-Christian values, we Americans are no longer exceptional. Instead of refusing to be ruled by anything other than our consciences, we will accept the carrot-and-stick of a new techno-feudalism.
In the face of such dark possibility, I have sloughed off my veneer of “normalcy.” It has not been pleasant. My conscience demands it.
We need not lose our American identity, our freedom, or our way of life. But, if we hope to save all of these things and more, at the very least we had best be willing to risk someone, somewhere labeling us as an extremist. We might even embrace being called an extremist who is in service to freedom.
