2017 IN REVIEW: YET ANOTHER YEAR WHICH CONVINCES ME ALL THE MORE THAT RADICAL STRUCTURAL CHANGE IS NECESSARY ON THIS PLANET IF WE ARE TO SURVIVE, AND THAT ESSENTIALLY, THE CULTURE WARS IN AMERICA HAVE SPREAD WORLDWIDE FROM A BINARY PERSPECTIVE, AND THAT THE ENTIRE CORE-PERIPHERY EXPANSION OF CIVILIZATION IS ESSENTIALLY STALLED IN A WWI STYLE TRENCH WARFARE TYPE OF DEADLOCK: WHAT, THEREFORE, WILL IT TAKE TO BREAK THE DEADLOCK?
As I mull over 2017, such as it was, with its seemingly never-ending litany of mass shootings, accusations of sexual misconduct on the part of fourth wave feminist ‘calling out culture’ warrior princesses, who all now seem to be hell-bent on criminalizing the entire male gender for no other reason than having a penis and being Caucasian and ‘hetero-normative’, or ‘hetero-patriarchal’, I feel more than ever that the world has completely lost all sense of measure and right-mindedness in its hell-bent pursuit of secular-humanist so-called ‘progressive’ subjectively constructed postmodern moral relativism.
There. I said it in one full, run-on sentence. I feel much better now!!! Having graduated from Niagara College’s Social Service Worker Program in April of 2017, and having now joined the Ontario College of Social Workers and Social Service Workers as a dues-paying member, I now find myself studying for my BSW at Trent University in Peterborough ON, and am faced with an increasingly shrill litany of both Alt Right corporate malfeasance and proto fascist bigotry, and Alt Left radical Communist and Socialist hatred and intolerance at the secular humanist level of anything and anybody who espouses hetero-normative and hetero-patriarchal Caucasian Judeo-Christian forms of ideation and behaviour.
It appears that the middle ground and the middle course in all social discourse, starting from the economic, job-based basis of the middle course in society, has essentially radicalized so many people into espousing such violently aggressive ideas and behaviour, that this continent and the rest of the world is now awash in mass shootings, gang rape, genocide, mass extinctions of species and wildlife habitats, the violent uprooting and migrations of entire populations of entire regions of the world’s people, who seem to be being used as pawns in an international power game of re-configuring the global relationships of money, power, property, prestige, and personalities writ large.
I think that those who started this culture war, on both sides, never realized the existence of the Law of Unintended Consequences: That essentially by dialectically attempting to reconfigure the status quo from a core-periphery perspective, each to their own perceived advantage, they have essentially led this planet to the brink of moral collapse, resource depletion and exhaustion, human resource exhaustion at the metaphysical level through the brutality of neo-feudalistic modern, industrial and postmodern and post-industrial capitalist exploitation, habitat destruction, and generally the exacerbation of socio-economic, socio-cultural, linguisto-cultural, ethno-linguistic and socio-religious class-based disparities and gender related antagonisms heretofore unheard of since the dawn of civilization these many thousands of years ago.
Whoever thought that it would be a good idea to effectuate a full frontal assault on the established social order, in an alleged quest for what is still billed as a quest for ‘equality’, which is resembling more and more like a postmodern mysandric witch hunt at the highest levels, executed by a secular women’s ‘rights’ movement who seem to be more concerned with acquiring the perks of money, power, property, prestige and the aggrandizement of their own personalities, explicitly at the expense of expelling men from centre stage in society, and preventing other men from reaching it by putting women in their place, never expected, in my opinion, that such a vociferously belligerent and aggressive proto fascist and neo-fascist populist, corporately-led, and government aided and abetted countercultural backlash would have ever reared its ugly head at them with such alacrity so as to ‘Trump’, so to speak, if you pardon the pun, every thrust of the secular-humanist ‘progressive’ Alt Left with an equal if not more powerfully opposite parry from the highly moneyed quarters of the Alt Right’s military-industrial and financial wellspring of temporal power, not to mention the total mobilization of their demagogic corporately owned media and academic brain trust.
Sometimes I think that some people don’t have a firm grasp of the laws of the universe, such as Newton’s Laws of Motion. Newton’s Third Law of Motion states that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Simple enough if you ask me. But the more we go deeper into these Culture Wars, the more I fear we are digging our own graves, because the more one side pushes, the more the other side will push back equally hard. What the secular humanist ‘progressives’ made as their tragic and fatal mistake, is the same mistake that everybody who thinks that they are right and everybody else is wrong makes: that essentially, their point of view will ultimately prevail over time, and that dialectically, their point of view is essentially the teleologically best-suited outcome for civilization, and that they seem to see things from a dialectically linear and deterministic perspective of ultimate and inevitable cause and effect.
Case in point, getting back to the secular humanist ‘progressives.’ In the 1960s and 70s, when they bore sway, or thought they did, over the agenda in western society, the feeling was that secular-humanist progressive technocracy was going to ultimately win the day and was going to ‘deliver the goods’, both literally and figuratively to all and sundry, with simply a bigger and better econometric model of technocratic management, of taxing and spending, and of universal entitlement to government benefits in health, education, and social services, all within the context of a baby boom that was supposedly never going to end, the growth in population was going to continue unabated, the tax base was going to continue to grow, the economy was going to continue to expand and production and consumption was going to continue to grow either linearly or even exponentially forever until Kingdom Come and we were all going to go to the Nirvana of shopping mall and drive-in and drive-through consumer heaven on earth in a suburban peripheral landscape of a continuously and never-ending frontier of suburban sprawl on a sort of hagiographied Frederic Jackson Turner sort of Frontier in American History, wherein the frontier of suburbia and its consumer cornucopia of mammonesque material abundance would be the ultimate orgasmatronic fulfillment of some sort of pervertedly maladaptive interpretation of American Liberty and Freedom.
Well, I guess something funny happened on the way to the forum. The best laid plans of mice and men, as we say. We were all also supposed to evolve naturally into consumer plebeian peons who worshipped materialism and material accumulation and we were supposed to slough off the superstition of Christianity and religion in general, and all embrace the secular religiosity of consumerism, shopping, television, social media, sports, fast food, cars, sexual ‘liberation’ and so on. I think some people did not anticipate that some people would continue to embrace traditional Christianity, not so much despite all this secularism, but in fact because of it, which is precisely my point about Newton’s Third law of Motion. A society in motion in one direction cannot continue unabatedly in that direction without some equal and opposing force challenging its course of action. This is simply a law of nature. Hegel and Marx realized this early on and formulated their dialectic notion of history, which is cyclical and circular, not linear, like both capitalism and secular-humanistic ‘progressivism’ likes to try and convince us of.
So where is all of this leading? Hard to tell. I do know that the Culture Wars are a zero sum game, and like any war in history, essentially there is no real winner. Civilization is ultimately the loser and the worse off for any war. War is a condemnation of civilization and an abject affirmation of the failure of civilization, such as it is, to actually be civilized. Like Joe Jackson, the British singer sang, off of his album ‘Night and Day’, with the song ‘Real Men’: ‘Man makes a gun-man goes to war/man can kill and man can drink/and man can take a whore/kill all the blacks-kill all the reds/and if there is a war between the sexes/then there’ll be no people left.’ I think those words speak for themselves. We live in a culture of death and dying, of blood and violence and murder, of murder mysteries, of serial killers, serial rapists, mass shooters, genocide, of ‘action/adventure’ movies with stylized gun violence sequences which are now so over the top and split second sequenced in the way they are filmed, that I cannot even watch those movies anymore, my eyes and neural cortex get overwhelmed and psychologically antagonized by it all, it is so violent and aggressive, and I have absorbed so much media violence and ugliness that that stuff simply cannot ‘go in’ anymore. I have to essentially block it out if I am to survive as a spiritual human being.
So I will go to my two brothers’ places this Christmas and spend time catching up on my brother bonding. Should be fun. I will try to put all the ugliness and horror of life on this planet to the side and focus on what Christmas is actually supposed to be about: the birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. Just goes to show you how far we have drifted as a society when the secular humanist imperative attempts to compel us to deny the very existence and public presence and observance of a society’s foundational historical figure, ostensibly in the name of ‘neutrality’, and of ‘not offending anybody.’ Like John Mellancamp sang off the Scarecrow album ‘You’ve got to stand for something, or you’re going to fall for anything.’ This could easily apply to Christians and traditionalists everywhere who feel that it is time to take back ownership of some semblance of moral dignity in society, without drifting towards the seduction of neo-fascist populist bigotry and racist ideation and behaviour of a violent or aggressive nature.
I think we can simply start by respectfully and courteously, yet assertively saying ‘Merry Christmas’ in public to people, regardless of their beliefs, and not be worried about offending their belief system, or lack thereof, but simply to affirm assertively and respectively our own belief system as Christians, without obliging anybody to bend or to be subject to our beliefs. It is simply a wish for the blessings of who we believe to be the Anointed One of God, to be conferred upon the recipient of that wish, upon the celebration of the designated birthdate of the Anointed One. It’s as simple as that. Nothing culturally imperialist or monolithically oppressive or hegemonic involved in such a simple wish for peace.
Let’s all chill out, shall we, and call a truce to the Culture Wars and sit down and break bread with each other during this season of rejoicing and enjoy one another’s company for a change shall we?
God bless you all. And have a Merry Christmas!!!
P E T E R S T U A R T . CA 
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