“I can’t remember if I cried when I read about his widowed bride, but something touched me deep inside, the day the music died.” American Pie, Don McLean
The music has certainly died in America. No matter how painful it is to admit this nation is but a shadow of its former self. Webster’s defined shadow as “An imperfect and faint representation.” This is not your grandfather’s America
Perhaps that is why American Pie was so poignant and why it hit a nerve with America. Released in 1971, the year I graduated from high school, there was an eeriness to the song that none of us could put a finger on. But yes, something about the song did “touch us deep inside.” The decade of the 70’s certainly left a mark on the soul of all who lived through those times.
It was as if we had been traumatized by the social revolution we had just lived through including 4-dead-in Ohio, the murder of the Kennedy’s, King, and Christian morality, causing a slow bleed-out of the American dream most of us had grown up in. We couldn’t really put our fingers on it because it wasn’t a single sniper shot that did it, but a slow agonizing cancer that took years to suck the life out.
But we felt the wound, we knew something had changed. We couldn’t put our finger on it but we sensed the drip, drip, drip, of normalcy leaving us as the reality of our wounding slowly sucked the Truth out of us. Maybe it was disenchantment, maybe it was the realization that this wasn’t Kansas anymore or simply the dread in the heart when you know that you can’t go home again.
America didn’t die. America was murdered. Yes, America was murdered and we had been eye witnesses to the assassination. Although the corpse was still warm, we sensed that a body-double had been inserted in its place. The Baby Boom generation watched it happen. In fact, we participated in it. We joined our parents on the Sea of Forgetfulness as we paddled our way out into the deep. A nation without a moral standard is a ship without a rudder. We were smiling broadly as the ship began to sink. Self indulgence ran the Good Ship America aground.
Some people call it suicide. But suicide is when you knowingly choose to end your own life. This wasn’t suicide. We didn’t do it on purpose. This was murder by mal-nutrition. “You are what you eat” we were told as we continued to gorge upon a Devil’s brew of licentiousness and liberty. Freedom is the right to what is right. There is no God given “right” to do wrong.
But our executioners had a plan. They understood what Cicero had warned centuries ago. There was poison in our food, but we loved the sweet taste as it dripped off the corners of our mouths. We trusted our “teachers” without taste-testing what they were serving.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.” Cicero 42 BC
America was murdered. The great “shining city on a hill” has had a bushel dropped over it. Recent events in Washington have exposed the rotting corpse. Some smell it, and some do not. But that wicked city that serves as the “head” of the nation is full of putrefying sores.
From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. Isaiah 1:6
America was destroyed from within. Like an unsuspecting patient we didn’t recognize the virus that had invaded the body politic. We ignored the symptoms, and elected those who promised a secular cure. But changing prescriptions merely treated the symptoms. The cancer metastasized until the entire body was sick. It altered our DNA to the point that the dementia-like poison clouded our ability to think. We passed it on to our posterity and watched the culture descend into a moral swamp.
Carly Simon was right when she sang these words in her hit Anticipation, “Let’s stay right here for these are the good ole days.”
That is a sad thought, isn’t it? That this might be as good as it will ever get for our children and grandchildren.
Can America be saved? Only God knows. The rotting corpse of American Christianity has succumbed to the god of materialism. As long as we continue to value “stuff” over Truth there will be no firm foundation upon which we can rebuild.
The decadent corpse of the American government has been exposed and the putrefying smell from the rot blows across the plains. Only a return to our Christian foundations can resurrect our nation.
The God-hating Left warned us of their slow march through the institutions. Like termites they gnawed away at our culture leaving only a shell of the original building blocks. What would God have His people do? Let’s bring justice back. Out with the old and in with the new. We, the people, must clean the house.
“See, I have this day set you over the nations and over the kingdoms, To root out and to pull down, To destroy and to throw down, To build and to plant.” Jeremiah 1:12
The America we once knew is dead. Long live America!! Do you have the stomach for it? Are you up for the task? Sink or swim. Fight or flight. Where do you stand? Everything hinges on what we do now.
Tighten your belt and earn your meal money. We Christians have a lot of work to do.
