May 25th, 2021: Where Are We?

 


Many years ago, I used to run camps for senior high school kids. I had a camper who came from Yellowknife, the capital city of the NWT. He came back to camp for four summers in a row. I decided to ask him at his last camp about his reasons for coming back to our camp. He told me that he came back because he knew very well what to expect, how to have fun, and how to get himself into trouble. He said: "You gave the same welcome talk every year. You gave the same set of rules and had the same expectations." He took comfort in that because his home life didn't provide him that sense of security.


Why do we feel so unsettling these days? It is not because of Covid-19 alone. What happened in the Summer of 2020 tells us that our societies celebrate lawlessness. Our governments seem to be content with the dismantling of order and security. We are not sure what about our nations are really. What we used to cherish with our nations' constitutions is no longer there. Political and business leaders don't seem to know how to lead. They would prefer to take directions from various radical sectors of our society.


We talk about freedom only to discover that we have created for ourselves a new form of imprisonment. It is the imprisonment of a new language where we can longer express ourselves either freely or meaningfully. We don't seem to have a clear set of guidelines of how we can move forward together. Special Interest Groups have hijacked the political, cultural, and educational agendas of our nations. Our politicians are now speaking with a new set of talking points. It is a series of code words. Somehow we don't feel the sincerity and the convictions when they talk.


We witness the deterioration of our children's education. They do not get an education; they are now on the receiving end of an indoctrination. Our university is not about high learning. It is about seeking conformity, not discovery. Small and narrow-mindedness have taken over many university campuses. There is no longer any discourse about any issue of our time. If we disagree with what is going on right now, these folks will find ways to censor us. The problem is they use racial terms to label us to get their way. There is no way to know how to be in this society because we have lost our freedom to speak.


John 13: 34

"A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another."


Ephesians 2: 14

"For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility."

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