THE MURDEROUS MAYHEM OF REGRESSIVE CULTURE
By: T. D. Duff
The murders of 4 innocents at the Tulsa medical facility, and the 19 innocent children, in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th grade and 2 adults at Robb Elementary school in Uvdale, Texas is yet more cruel testimony to the continuing regressive culture, and the dumbing down of America, begun by Republican President Reagan in 1981, that has cruelly led to 200 mass shootings in 2022.
Add to the regressive mayhem, the Buffalo, New York murders, the murders of seventeen teenagers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on Valentine's Day, 2018. This is tragically becoming commonplace in our culture of violence and NATO led war.
Add to the regressive mayhem, the 59 people that were slaughtered and 510 wounded in Las Vegas, on October 1, 2017, and now on May 24, 2022 even more innocent children are cut down in their own school. Add to the regressive mayhem all of the school shootings we have been horrified by.
When will we put an end to it all?
Over one-hundred years ago, in May 1916, President Woodrow Wilson tried to cut the Gordian knot. This was a seminal period in history. He was dealing with the intractable problem of keeping America out of World War I and maintaining peace in the world. He announced that if the European combatants laid down their arms, America would join a League to Enforce Peace. It was a global version of the Pan-American pact that he had been pushing in the Western Hemisphere.
Wilson firmly believed in the essential progressive agenda: Objective experts, plus inspiring leaders and educated citizens, equal a society governed by reason not force. Underlying it all was the most basic faith of all: in humanity itself. Progressive thinkers like John Dewey, Thorstein Veblen, and historian Charles Beard insisted, unlike the late-nineteenth-century Social Darwinists, who declared people as fundamentally selfish, that people were naturally generous and cooperative.
It was the evil of anarchic capitalism that made men act like beasts, the progressives claimed. The progressives stood firmly against, the theologians who saw humanity forever tainted by original sin. Progressives vigorously supported the champions of Social Gospel Christianity who insisted that evil resided in the world, not in mankind.
Wilson was the son and grandson of Presbyterian ministers, and he saw the Bible as the greatest constitution of all, "the Magna Charta of the human soul." Wilson's devotion to order and reason was classically progressive. He had supreme faith that leaders could educate people. He knew that people sometimes believed in irrational and selfish things. He possessed an almost mystical faith that the people would follow him, if he could speak enough to them. He believed his words could make Americans seek reason and impartiality, and peace.
It was Wilson's hope that the United States, given its lack of selfish motives, could stand apart from Europe's balance of power clash. Wilson stated that the United States must play "a part of impartial mediation." The war's "causes cannot touch us," he added, but its "very existence affords us opportunities for friendship and disinterested service."
Wilson sincerely had a vision of a world without power politics, as the most effective way to ensure peace. The reality of his reason would become clearer when he attempted to import his progressive ideals overseas.
French author Anatole France declared that a world without power politics, "was like a town without a brothel." The frustrated French premier, Georges Clemenceau fought back against Wilson, saying. "We have become what we are because we have been shaped by the rough hand of the world in which we have to live and we have survived only because we are a tough bunch." To Wilson and the progressives the balance of power looked both immoral and archaic, comparing Europe's balance of power to the savage anarchic capitalism that saw selfishness the way of the world.
Like most Americans, Wilson hoped to keep the United States out of World War I. He had resisted intense pressure to join the fray, even after hundreds of American civilians were drowned by German submarines. On the evening of April 2, 1917, as a light rain fell, Wilson entered the Capital at 8:32pm, to speak to Congress.
He ended his speech by declaring that "America will fight for the things which we have always carried nearest to our hearts, for democracy, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free." He had asked Congress to declare war. He then returned to the White House and cried.
Five days later the United States was at war in Europe. The war that "would end all wars," had begun.
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