Post Election Thoughts

It’s been one month since the election, so I’ve had time to try to think things through and put them in a little perspective. My feeling about what the election means for our country hasn’t changed. I believe we’ve reached a tipping point where there are too many takers and not enough producers and givers. Politicians continue to pretend that we can tax the minority enough to support the majority, but as the supported class continues to grow, the productive class sees less and less reason to produce.

Now I know that just saying that marks me as one who hates the underclass and thinks that they’re all lazy. But nothing could be further from the truth. You don’t have to have a majority of dependent people to ruin a society. It’s a question of a culture that has slowly developed over the past half a century or so, and that has picked up tremendous speed in the last few years. Our country is in deep, deep economic turmoil, we are worse off now than we were four years ago, and yet we have handily reelected a man who has to bear the primary responsibility for it.

Bob Costas says that he is not against people having guns; he is worried about a gun culture, by which I assume he means a mentality whereby people think of guns as an integral part of society rather than as something that is occasionally needed to fix a temporary problem. That’s how I think of welfare. It’s great that our country is prosperous enough to help people fix a temporary unemployment problem, or who are simply incapable of working. But it seems that welfare has become a culture, or a state of permanent mind. It is not a temporary fix as it was intended. Entire generations of people grow up knowing no other way of life. Once that population gets large enough, it brings down the rest of society with it.

One of the founding fathers, I forget which one, said something to the effect that democracy only works until the people realize that they can vote anything they want for themselves. That’s where I’m afraid we are at.

The other thing that keeps intruding on my thoughts is the way in which Christianity is being bashed more and more every year. That’s also something that seems to have picked up speed in the past few years. When the Obama administration attempted to force religious employers to provide insurance for their employees that would guarantee them access to abortion, the employers naturally objected. The telling point is that the administration couldn’t even understand why they were objecting. That’s how ingrained anti-Christian thinking has become. The Chick-Fil-A fiasco was another telling incident the way some politicians and media people vehemently reacted to a business owner expressing his Christian viewpoint. They didn’t even care that there has never been any adverse action against any gay person; they just couldn’t tolerate the fact that someone could even have Christian thoughts on the subject.

There are many other examples of this sort of intolerance against Christians, and my point is not only that the number of instances of Christian bashing is increasing, but that they are becoming more and more extreme. As the secular mind becomes more and more entrenched in the world’s philosophy, it becomes more and more impossible for it to comprehend that there can even be another way of thinking. It seems like a prelude to persecution.

I truly believe that these two things, an entrenched culture of dependency and a virulent hatred of Christianity, are what is bringing our country down. Can this be reversed? Yes. Do I think it will be? No. Do I like it? Of course not. It scares the daylights out of me. But if the loss of our freedoms and the persecution of Christians are some of the things that need to happen before the Lord returns, then we will have to deal with it. And rejoice when the end comes.