Apocalypse Now: Toxic Classroom Toxic Society

In order for a new year or next year to be a good year or a better year, it is necessary to confront the inadequacies of the former calendar. That is, it is necessary to confront our own deficiencies and those obstacles we encountered around us. We must, to the best of our ability, and cautious not to descend into a haphazard and unfair critique - i.e., the nuclear option - and cognizant of the planks in our own eyes, proceed into the wilderness relying on the Church's guidance, the guidance of faithful pastors and the witness of the saints whose teaching disposes us to the influence of the Holy Ghost.

Looking back for a moment, the Gospel according to St Matthew for the Second Sunday in Advent (2019) read in part (3:1-3):

In those days came John the Baptist, preaching in the wilderness of Judaea, And saying, Repent ye: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by the prophet Esaias, saying, The voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare ye the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.

During Advent, the Propers of the Liturgy frequently prodded us to get straight our priorities, to prepare a way for the Lord to enter more fully into our lives. The biblical readings (and well written and well-timed homilies) invite listeners to accept personal responsibility for their actions, to repent and to seek the grace that enables in one's heart the acceptance of God's will, the identification of authentic freedom and the responsible exercise of that freedom, which necessarily includes the ability to identify goodness to enact justice and foster peace among men.

The Four Last Things - death, judgement, heaven or hell - should have figured prominently in Advent homilies and in the meditations of worshipers who desire heaven. Having one's head rightly in the clouds, so-to-speak, should not, should not, diminish a concern for the gifts to be found in this life which is itself a gift from God. We look to Holy Mother Church to provide context and a sense of authentic priority.

So, Lent will remind us of our mortality, and those annoying Four Last Things will become, again, front and centre. Vita incerta, mors certissima. Life is uncertain; death is most certain. Sadly, many people behave like they can get away with anything without suffering consequence, without regret. The growing tendency in the West is for people to blame-shift, to ignore the responsibility to speak the truth even if by speaking the truth one must himself admit fault, even if speaking the truth means loss of opportunity and causes one to be assaulted by bullies who, hypocrites that they are, deny others the opportunity to express themselves while using their personal fictions as ammunition to blast away at others.

So, then, an offer of an essay that draws its substance from conversations with students, staff and teachers, passersby, an essay that draws attention to our schools, to an engine of culture and to those who maintain that engine and who are driven around by that engine.

Ailing Freedom

Freedom, that precious gift, hard earned and made delicate when men forget that, in order for freedom to survive and thrive, only hearts made pure by God's grace, and thereby dedicated to preserving the dignity of man, are capable of sustaining that gift of freedom. Without courageous souls persevering in the truth of the Gospel and dedicated to defending inalienable rights, can there be any doubt that societies will return to primitive superstitions that rely on scapegoats and genocide in an attempt to appease angry mobs and capricious gods?



Abaddon's Picnic

Young people, fed a steady diet of left-wing ideology, are becoming adept at weaponizing their appropriated victim status. Appropriated... from legitimate victims who have suffered a loss of innocence. Appropriated... from those violated by the effects of so-called progressive theories that diminish the dignity of man and alienate people from one another.

Those ensnared by various left-wing ideologies, having become willing participants in an agenda born of a evil genius, have themselves become agents of evil now acting to rob others of their human dignity.

In far too many cases, having learned to control others by feigning weakness and vulnerability, too many college students appropriate power that enables them to avoid the responsibility to live rational adult lives.

Many ill-mannered college students are absolving themselves of the responsibility to conduct themselves with integrity and deference to legitimate authority. When presented, for example, with their laziness, lack of achievement and counterproductive influence on others, and the facts of their complacency, they attempt to assassinate the characters of those who challenge their fraud. Afterwards, they retreat to a place built for them by ideologues, a place which gives them relief from confronting the wickedness of their actions. They are snowflakes composed of gasoline which explodes the moment it is ignited by any challenge to their masquerade.


Said explosive individuals lash out with verbal guns blazing, before any reasoned debate might further expose them as charlatans, cowards and fascists. They are quick to point and fire their weapons loaded with accusations of harassment and a rainbow of phobias, labels intended to rob the opposition of any voice with which to defend themselves. These young minions, unaware of how vindictive they are becoming, have no constructive reasons, no humane rationale to support their agendas. They are driven by instinct, and in many instances vengeance. They attempt to own the narrative at all costs, even if that means dehumanizing others and suppressing speech. Which is, of course, a direct violation of the progressive credo. However, like all pitchfork carrying anarchists, they permit themselves extensive latitude to violate their own principles - because they are the righteous punishing the unrighteous! - while according no such accommodation to those who expose and criticize their blatant hypocrisy.

1 John 3:10

By this it may be seen who are the children of God, and who are the children of the devil: whoever does not do right is not of God, nor he who does not love his brother.

Judgement

Bad ideas flooding out of colleges and universities, largely through the intercession of the mainstream media, empower bad actors in the wider community. The assault on small business owners and others by individuals and groups seeking to intimidate and eliminate opposition to transforming societies into mirror images of their tragically wounded psyches has become a diabolical hobby for some. Vengeful men and women attempt to bankrupt individuals and businesses that represent a threat to the spread of the progressive agenda. Small businesses and individuals with few financial resources are convenient targets, easy prey for the sting operations enacted by bullies with a grotesque understanding of fair play and social justice. The persistent preoccupation for all bullies is, of course, the acquisition and retention of power, and because they lack formation in the responsible use of power they are easily and routinely corrupted by it.

Human rights tribunals (HRTs) are particularly prone to abuse by power hungry morally compromised individuals. Typically, HRTs acquiesce and become Brownshirts, guns-for-hire for vengeful individuals bent on converting minds by extortion, committees made assassins by individuals who weaponize said tribunals to do the dirtiest of dirty work. However, a recent decision by one such tribunal (p.60, File:17587 BC Human Rights Tribunal) rightly exposed one misguided individual's contemptible behavior, an individual adept at harassment and intimidation.

One wonders, however, if one day, because of the successful exploitation of HRTs by self appointed sheriffs of naughty-ham, citizens will be forced to tolerate even wilder behavior as the politics of tolerance attenuate citizens' ability to challenge and refuse the negative fallout of "progressive" ideology. Oh wait, we're already there.

Counter Revolution

Casual conversations - e.g., in cafes, grocery store lines - over the past few months affirm that not all college-dwellers are agents of cultural suicide. Students and faculty alike are growing frustrated with the nonsensical behavior of petulant ideologues bent on dragging everyone down into their chaos. Resistance is rising confidently in opposition to those whose militant posturing often results in the suppression of authentic diversity.

How can we trust scholarship to give us useful answers if there isn’t genuine intellectual debate? - National Post

Reasonable people are frustrated having to bow to the shaming rituals of those who, having no rational arguments to support their calls for change, demand that societies fully embrace the sexual revolution and side with the revisionist forces that want to reshape human beings into cheap and disposable versions of themselves.

There is the other plague of shutting down free speech on campus, so-called de-platforming of visiting speakers who offer any point of view other than the ruling consensus, and the craven submission of faculty and administrations to the howling of righteous student activists. - Rex Murphy

Routine attempts to suppress speech, to deny free association and deny free expression of religious activity on public campuses, that is, campuses supported by tax paying people of faith, are largely the doings of people possessed by a highly destructive mentality. The atheistic secularist typically twinned with his sibling, the progressivist, views religious expression as foreign, colonial (in a most derogatory sense), and alien to their view of what the public square should be. Atheistic secularists, by lobbying for freedom from religion, have placed themselves in opposition to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the American Constitution. The establishment of free democracies, if the documents just named have any meaning at all, is first among other considerations intended for the freedom to freely live religious lives, and for others - who choose not to live as people of faith - to live freely in those God-centred societies. As citizens supposedly equal under the law, people of faith and people of no faith are acknowledged as equally entitled to freely exercise their God-given rights under the law. That some, i.e., typically those who have no appreciation nor any respect for the rule of law and inalienable rights, should try to mitigate the full breadth of recognition of inalienable rights is all the more reason why people of faith and all people of goodwill must challenge any assumption or attempt that denies the free exercise of religion. Those who propose limits on inalienable rights must be reminded that the Christian Faith, which is the foundation upon which western democracies are built, and which successful democracies preserve, democracies such as Hungary, cannot be confined merely to church buildings on Sundays. Christianity is a public and personal faith, and cannot be locked behind closed doors, nor can it be consigned to that strange location where Christians have no voice in the public square as politicians, judges, teachers, doctors, nurses, etc.

Acknowledging that each person is created in the image and likeness of God, faithful Christians and Jews promote laws that respect fundamental human dignity.

Slaughtering Innocence

Held to no other authority than the state, atheistic secularists and their kin the progressivists - all being left-wing ideologues - are prone to robbing others of that dignity. Anyone who believes the state grants inalienable rights, i.e., is the origin of human rights, has confused the nature and role of the state. The state exists to protect inalienable rights, not to claim dominance over or the ability to dismantle them. It is impossible to defend human rights if we credit to the state the origin of said rights. A state that claims the power of origin also has the power to deny said rights. The reality of inalienable rights precedes any state. The state has no authority to grant rights; the state has only the responsibility to protect human rights. If the state cannot protect those rights, citizens owe such a state no loyalty other than to remind their fellow human beings who are the politicians and bureaucrats who represent the state, their fellow citizens subject to the natural law, that the state must therefore conform to the natural law. Politicians of the so-called "personally-opposed" variety, the Pelosis and Bidenses of the world, demonstrate the most loathsome form of hypocrisy by abstaining from the responsibility to acknowledge reality. Conformity of one's actions to the natural law cannot be avoided by hiding behind casuistry and soft headed jargon when human dignity, the dignity of human life, is on the line.

Oddly, but not surprisingly, militant progressives (secularists, leftists, liberals, etc.) habitually behave more like the fascists they claim to oppose. And, people of goodwill, sorely tested by the wayward antics of socialists-in-sheep's-clothing, are getting fed up with attempts to marginalize traditional values and the down-to-earth people who hold those values and try to live by them.

Angel of The Revelation (Revelation Chapter 10) by William Blake

Academia Armageddon

Applying for university enrollment is obligingly confessional and constitutes a noble act of candour and an absence of stifling ego. It says, in effect, “I recognize that I am ignorant of very much, have a real desire to escape immaturity of thought and to fit my mind as much as I can to expand my sensibility to the appreciation of the works of intellect and imagination. Above all I want to encounter new ideas, escape the sludge of teenage thought, and expand my range of opinion.”

Any application to enter university tacitly states a fine aspiration; to wit: “I wish to escape parochialism of place, ethnicity, and received and unexamined semi-ideas. I also wish that, under the supervision and instruction of wiser and more learned people than I am, to graduate with fuller, clearer ideas of myself, my potential, and an awareness of the finest achievements of my own and other civilizations. Should an undergraduate degree also improve my chances to finding employment, I will regard that as a side-benefit.”

The heart of an application is this: “I am ignorant and immature: please teach me.”

Now, no one, at almost any age (save certain CNN anchors), is totally ignorant. But young people have a greater share, almost by definition, of that annoying condition, so it always something of a holiday for the human spirit when many face up to their condition, by the act of seeking enrolment in a university, and commit to making themselves, in the terms above, better people.

https://nationalpost.com/opinion/rex-murphy-campus-social-justice-maoists-dared-to-come-for-camille-paglia-big-mistake

Echoing a growing concern among a minority of students and professors that a majority of peers expect to gain the most from the least effort invested, one left-leaning but otherwise pleasant and well-informed lecturer we'll call Hermione, an historian at a nearby college, remarked it's as if there is an Armageddon happening on the campus where she works. Her experience summarizes the experiences of many if not all of those with whom I have spoken these past few months or so.

Hermione's "Armageddon" is fueled or exacerbated by the flood of academic accommodations (concessions?) given to students who are not able to sustain rigorous study required by any institution of higher learning that prizes the achievement of excellence. Universities, it seems, are being reduced to nurseries wherein regressive behaviour is awarded opportunity to monopolize classroom discussions and distract from effective intellectual discourse. Simply put, Hermione confirmed that the inmates are currently in charge of the asylum.

That "Armageddon" is shorthand for a massive and ongoing loss of virtue, the virtue of a comprehensive and necessary humility described in the National Post article by Mr. Rex Murphy cited at the beginning of this section.

Hermione's classroom might be characterized as a parking lot for a sizable portion of students who are not prepared to own the opportunity to improve their minds. Rather than demonstrate an appropriate receptivity to guidance, students frequently operate under a rubric of aggressive and irreverent suspicion. Granted, there is good reason to acknowledge that the integrity of many university-level programs is suspect because professors frequently therein demand uncritical acceptance of propaganda more than offering opportunities to engaging in authentic learning, in critical thinking, and in a robust evaluation of all ideas.

(I)f the undergraduate classrooms have too many weak, ill-prepared and poorly motivated students, then they are unlikely to provide the rigorous inquiry, robust debates and profound engagement that we all want Canadian university students to experience. We do have too many students or, more accurately, too many of the wrong students, in our universities at present. - Ken Coates

Junk in, junk out, is a variation on the computer axiom. Any institution that puts Madonna and hegemony in the same sentence, never mind in the title of a thesis, has cut the cords on the balloon and is floating off on some vague, directionless journey to nowhere in particular. - Rex Murphy

Fallout

Colleges have become breeding grounds for entitlement and narcissistic behavior, the radioactive fallout that descends from that toxic cloud of progressivism. Mind you, the breeding of rabid ideologues begins earlier at or in public institutions of lower learning. Public schools are graduating intellectually incompetent and socially illiterate citizens by the droves. Ask any college teacher of an English grammar course about the essays written by their first year students and you are likely to hear that many, if not most high school students entering college, are barely able to construct a complete and meaningful sentence.

A few friends who are grade-school teachers with considerable experience acknowledge they, too, are finding it very difficult, highly stressful and a continuous frustration dealing with parents whose behaviour is little different than the problematic behaviour of their children. Teachers and staff feel bullied by parents who have weaponized their children. Like the worst stage parents - Aren't all stage parents the worst at getting along with others? - who routinely badger teachers, hockey coaches, private music teachers, etc., in order to secure advantage for their undeserving children, or children who want no part in a parent's unfulfilled dream of stardom, parents of elementary, middle and high school kids are enabling their children to behave in ways that rob teachers, administrators and other students of a healthy learning environment characterized by equal opportunity and appropriate reward for actual achievement.

If there is any doubt that parents are using illegitimate means to acquire opportunities for their kids, recall the exposure of the high incidence of fraud and cheating these past two years alone.

Actresses, Business Leaders and Other Wealthy Parents Charged in U.S. College Entry Fraud

• https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/12/us/college-admissions-cheating-scandal.html
• https://globalnews.ca/news/6081986/felicity-huffman-released-from-prison/
• https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/04/09/lori-loughlin-other-parents-face-additional-charges-college-admissions-scandal/
• https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-college-admissions-bribe-fixer-20190324-story.html

Thanks to parents who have home-schooled their children or who have enabled their children to think critically, there are a few kids who know and act better than their badly formed and morally compromised peers. Thankfully, too, private religious schools are producing citizens who have an appropriate sense of how to behave in a virtuous manner in the classroom and in society.

Ephesians 6:12

For we are not contending against flesh and blood, but against the principalities, against the powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.

Prepare ye the way of the Lord

Dismantling the structures of progressive - i.e., regressive - ideology requires a steady, quiet, prayer-filled subversion, and a sense of humour. The new subversive is one who conserves the inalienable dignity of human beings. A new subversive takes the long road by looking for and by creating opportunities that: 1) enable rational discourse among individuals rather than attempting to engage mobs in lecture halls; 2) honor personal encounter; 3) encourage the discovery and celebration of human dignity; and 4) foster awareness of the fact that everyone yearns for peace, understanding, forgiveness and love, and that there is only One Who can fulfill the deepest yearnings of the human heart - Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

https://www.catholicstand.com/we-need-to-hear-life-is-hard/

The new subversive is a mature witness to truth, goodness and beauty, an informed witness to the Incarnation, a faithful witness to the Logos become flesh, a Catholic who knows the road home and is willing to walk that long road at the risk of being repeatedly attacked along the way. For a Catholic, Divine Worship (Mass) is the locus in which and around which and through which the mind and heart are formed and sustained to meet the challenges of the mission to bring the Gospel into the public square.

Given the treacherous way ahead, Catholics should seek grace to speak and act with the wisdom of God so that others may meet heart to heart, immersed in a communion of grace in Christ Jesus offered them by fervent witnesses of Jesus Christ.

There are steep mountains to climb. None are so high that the willing soul, with God's help, cannot conquer them.

A few sentences earlier, a sense of humour was inserted into the recipe for restoring sanity. We must confront dower ideologues with well constructed tributes that help them confront the monster in their mirror.


*** Blogger's Note - This essay was prepared some months ago prior to a recent event which has confirmed this blogger's concern that society is under threat, and that Catholics must seek God's grace to manifest wisdom and resilience in the face of mounting challenges. ***