Rumors of pending elitist indictments sparkle through the national bandwidth, illegal aliens head home, the truth about Epstein comes to a boil -- lately, the political news has been encouraging, slaking some of our thirst for retribution and providing a glimpse of a viable, if not glorious future.

(Aren’t we shocked by the fact that all these unsavory allegations fail to shock us? Haven’t we been expecting, and to a certain extent, accepting that level of malpractice in our government? We have, I’m afraid, been well trained.)

Trump’s policies, clever maneuvers, and inventive approaches are spot on and are even having a positive effect on our culture, but that culture is still very sick -- we “have sinned and come short of the glory of God.“ (Romans 3:23) Example:  the monsters in Alabama who held ten children captive in a storm shelter for three years, using them for their sexually deviant, sadistic pleasures. The youngest child was just two. That’s at one end of the sin spectrum, but the misery and malfeasance this society has meted out to each other and to our offspring have a much broader scope. After all, children are our society – without them we cease to exist.

Societal malaise does hit the kids the hardest. We have allowed pharmaceutical companies and unscrupulous doctors to shoot our children full of questionable vaccines and hormones. We’ve even allowed doctors to perform mutilating surgeries on our kids. We feed them overly processed foods, set them in front of the TV, or hand them phones and tablets.

We’ve allowed our children to be taught complete nonsense, and it has brought our young people to the brink of insanity. As a high-school English teacher, I spent my evenings reading the essays my students had written. So often those writings revealed a lack of any sense of purpose, a deep-seated fear about the purported precarious state of the planet, worries about nuclear war, to say nothing of the papers that detailed the horrors of their private lives -- the boy who was prepping to testify about the night his dad tried to kill him; the girl whose dad promised to get braces for her crooked teeth if she would procure for him the sexual favors of some of her acquaintances; the girl whose mother had moved away leaving her daughter not only parentless, but homeless, living at a rest stop.

Not only is this bad, no -- horrific -- parenting a deep-seated problem in our society, but a great deal of damage has been done to our children by what we have not taught them.

Our schools, purporting to be neutral (which is nonsense -- The Law of the Excluded Middle), have left our children believing that this world is all just a precarious accident to be navigated via superficial, sensual gratification. Even those children whose parents try to teach them a solid, God-based worldview are fighting an uphill battle. If a child’s education never mentions God, or mentions Him only in the negative, the child is left having to weigh his parents’ teaching (often only a Sunday School lesson) against what he is fed in school (around six hours a day, five days a week).  Add to that what they pick up online, on TV, in the music they listen to, and we have a generation or two who are mostly rudderless on a stormy sea. Rudderless folk often solve their lostness with narcotics, alcohol, violence, and sex.

Which brings us to the other poison our kids must deal with -- the woke reverence for sexual deviation. No school age child should be faced with choosing his or her gender, or their sexual preference. No child should be face-to-face with a demonically dressed drag queen tainting their library experience -- all this and a society filled with sexual images on TV, on the kids’ phones, in the current rendition of what is called “music,” all presented against a backdrop of relative morality.  The inevitable result is disease, depression, and pregnancy, which we deal with by killing the babies.

Back to my original point: Trump is doing a whale of a job cleaning up the vagaries of our governmental processes and strengthening our foreign policy. He’s having astonishing success, but the tree he’s pruning is going rotten at the core.

Some of the problem is buried in the political lopsidedness of Washington D.C. The leftness, the wokeness, the arrogance of the governmental elite makes finding enough qualified, rational people to do the actual work of the executive branch difficult. The obvious fact that both violence and treason are now acceptable activities for the Left demonstrates the danger we are in. Not only are we dealing with a stage 4 governmental cancer (and it’s becoming more aggressive the closer Trump gets to effecting a cure) but we are facing a societal virus -- contagious and deadly. Great policy is only useful if the citizenry respects the law, but we find ourselves with the power-elite urging physical attacks, and a society with enough mental illness to produce actual attempts on Trump’s life. The rat in the corner is going to keep biting.

Truth be told, we are dealing with a society that is ill and has been for several generations. So what do we do?

1. Let’s look first, because most of our malaise has started here, at the ineffectual quality of our churches. To be fair, that appears to be what Americans want in a church -- some culturally familiar music, an encouraging word or two, free childcare for an hour on Sundays. Very few Christians have a solid knowledge of biblical theology. “Study to show yourselves approved unto God, rightly dividing the Word of Truth.” (2Timothy 2:15) We’re going to need God’s help if we’re going to save this nation -- He has made his instructions for how to enjoy a free society clear in Exodus 20 -- if most of us followed those ten instructions, we’d once again have a great nation. We could start there.
2. We’ve allowed our schools to fail, so our children are ignorant, which leaves them vulnerable -- leaves us all vulnerable. A constitutional republic can’t survive if its citizens don’t know how it works, and don’t care if it works. Nor can a society flourish if it doesn’t reverence truth, for all societies are based on mutual trust, and trust is based on truth, and day-to-day truth is built on a knowledge of and respect for absolute truth. We’ve built our current mores on the idea that you have your truth, and I have mine, which only produces chaos. Home schooling can go a long way to rectifying that, but we’re going to need school choice also to allow parents, who can’t homeschool, some hope for their kids.
3. Mental illness is rampant, as is drug abuse -- it’s hard to tell the difference. Either diagnosis is lethal. It’s rotting our cities, and our cities don’t seem to want curing. The homelessness problem isn’t about a lack of housing; it’s about lostness, misery, lack of purpose and direction. We may well need institutions to treat these folks, but I’m not sure that most of these folks want treatment and I’m not sure that sans a relationship with God that they can be rehabilitated. We’ll see.

We’re seeing a huge improvement in policy at the federal level, and we’re seeing some cultural change for the better, but unless these issues are aggressively addressed, we’ll have another election, and things will just snap back into the chaos we’ve gotten used to. God help us.

Deana Chadwell is an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing, logic, and literature. She can be contacted at 1window45@gmail.com

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