If your kids could be convinced that your family and its history were irredeemably wicked, what would it do to family cohesion? And would you have any confidence that when they grew up, they’d perpetuate the family’s faith, traditions, norms, or even its name? Next question: Would it be any different if your national family’s children were thus poisoned?
They are being poisoned, too. And in the wake of statues being felled, Western historical figures impugned, a war on the Founders, and the revision of American history comes an entirely predictable attack on the pioneers who risked their lives settling the West. The current battle involves a promise by Ohio liberal arts institution Marietta College to “review” the school’s Pioneer mascot in light of “recent events” (read: the wholesale attack on our culture).
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Of course, to many, a sports team’s mascot dispute may seem like a tempest in a teapot. But as writer Henry Wickham points out, this relates to the aforementioned undermining of our civilization. Wickham writes:
Stalin may have been a crude mass murderer, but he was cunningly perceptive. He recognized that an important element for the domination of the present is the control of the past. A ruler simply rewrites the past as necessary, airbrushes the pictures, turns persons into non-persons, all in a manner that justifies the agenda, no matter what or how brutal. This is an especially useful tactic if you accept the fantasy that history is necessarily progressive, and that there is “a right side of history” as Barak Obama used to assert.
The American Left has learned Stalin’s tactic well. Delegitimize the American past as incurably evil, convince people that there was nothing admirable in [the] American system, fill the textbooks and lectures with the pathological dishonesty of Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky, and any defense of contemporary American institutions and practices becomes next to impossible for those who don’t know better.
If Washington and Jefferson were nothing but slave-owning racists, then why bother with Washington’s Farewell Address or the Declaration of Independence? If Hamilton and Madison didn’t demand and get the immediate abolition of slavery, then why support the Constitution? Why prolong a constitutional republic when Utopia supposedly is within our grasp? Work within the system to destroy the system as Antonio Gramsci might have put it.
During Marietta’s review of the Pioneers, how “long before the halls ring with the usual charges of racism and white supremacy?” asks Wickham. Those are, do note, the charges of heresy du jour.
Of course, those in the destroy-America movement’s vanguard are consumed with hatred and their own prejudices and can’t be reasoned with. This relatively small group is enabled, however, by millions of confused people who can’t properly assess moral stature.
In deciding if the Pioneers deserve condemnation, we should ask to whom they’re being compared, Wickham states. For sure, “If you look for the worst in someone, you’re sure to find it,” the saying attributed to Abraham Lincoln (whose monument also has recently been assailed) informs. Who are these angels to whom Western figures pale in comparison?
Certainly not the American Indians. As was typical among pre-Christian, pagan civilizations, their societies were often characterized by continual, outrageously brutal, intertribal warfare, Wickham points out. “Human rights” were unheard of and human wrongs — among them sometimes slavery and human sacrifice — accepted.
The Western ideal is vastly superior, which is why virtually none of us wish to return to our pre-Christian ancestors’ ways (and whites have such ancestors as well).
The leftists sitting in judgment of our Pioneers, past, and patrimony certainly aren’t the angels, either. They’re generally vulgar, lewd, crude, hateful, and often sexually depraved. But also being godless, such people often deify themselves and, in accordance with this, instinctively make their own feelings, preferences, and priorities the ultimate moral guide.
Becoming their own moral yardstick, arrogance develops because it’s hard to be out of conformity with yourself. This is why leftists often view themselves as fonts of (faux) virtue, but look down their noses morally at others: For no one else can conform to their “moral” yardstick (themselves) as well as they can.
Note that acquaintance with actual virtue — that set of good moral habits, such as charity, chastity, diligence, humility, kindness, and faith — would dispel their hubristic notions.
Who did exhibit virtue were the Pioneers themselves. An irony here, and another striking leftist contradiction, is that liberals will portray immigrants and even illegal aliens as the most ethereal of people. “They’re risking their necks for a better life!” is the cry. But that’s hyperbole. The Pioneers, in contrast, actually were doing this.
They ventured West into the partially unknown, without supply lines, braving wild animals, sometimes unfriendly natives, disease, and at times deadly weather. No government programs or handouts enticed or awaited them, and no hospitals were available if someone fell ill on the Oregon Trail. They certainly did have dreams of a better future, but they knew they’d be realized only through hard and sometimes dangerous work and often involved carving a life out of the wilderness.
For a taste of the dangers, ponder the Donner party tragedy (short video below).
Or consider the story of the Sager children, dramatized and loosely portrayed in the 1974 film Seven Alone (trailer here), who were orphaned on the Oregon Trail in 1844 after losing both their parents.
(Full movie, well worth seeing and great family fare, can be watched free here.)
And below is a short History video on the trials Pioneers had to endure.
(Sort of puts the China virus in perspective, huh?)
Not portrayed in Seven Alone is that after reaching the West, the reward received by the two Sager boys, John and Francis, was to be murdered in the Whitman massacre (1847) in Washington State. Now far lesser people enjoy the country, freedoms, and prosperity they and other Pioneers helped secure and use their free time to murder our ancestors’ reputations.
