Letters to the Editor

 

March 30, 2022



Recently I have been observing how the chaos of the past two years is similar to the Vietnam era of the 1960's. There are differences obviously, this is not a replay of history, but it does rhyme. There were riots in the sixties, there have been riots today. The pullout from Afghanistan was compared to the evacuation of Saigon, even as it was happening. The rise of the drug culture in the sixties is mirrored today except that pot is now legal and the vaccines are mandated. The dislike of the draft in the sixties rhymes with the dislike of vaccine passports today. Nuclear war was talked about then and now. The electronic TV media of the sixties has been replaced by the electronic internet social media of today but you are still being told what to think. It's almost as if the hippies of the sixties abandoned making free love in Haight Ashbury and decided to get elected to high political office so that they could continue to eat without having to work. Only life with the hippies is not as much fun this time.


Another similarity from 50 years ago the Canadian government's violent response to the peaceful truckers convoy. The forward looking question that comes out of this episode of Trudeau declaring himself "Dictator Of Canada" is: Would a democratic government shoot it's own citizens to support an unpopular policy? The answer comes from the Vietnam era. During an anti-war protest on May 4, 1970, four students were shot dead on the campus of Kent State University, generating the lyrics to the song "Four Dead in Ohio". Yes, an elected government (Canadian, American or otherwise) will shoot and kill its own citizens to support a policy. Back then this realization by the general public caused a greater breakdown in civil order. Since the badge was used to surpress the concerns of the average American/Canadian, people began looking at the badge as illegitimate and the only thing that mattered was the gun. Trust broke down. Consequently, police began to be tarred with the epithet "Pigs" and portions of society began looking to themselves for security. Looking past the regional level, internatonally we may be facing the same thing. Nations are beginning to lose trust in America's commitment to their defense and they are starting to look to themselves for security. Are we headed towards an era when it doesn't matter whether you are for the Crips, the Bloods, MS13, the Regulators, the Moderators, the Russians, the Chinese, the Marine Corps or the Sheriff as long as you are supporting SOME armed gang? It's hard to believe that our empire could break up on something as ephemeral as trust but without trust everything stops working.

The real question is why all the chaos, then and now? In the Vietnam era people began to turn their back on God. It wasn't like churches were closing but compared to the much more colorful avenues like TV or Rock & Roll, churches simply seemed stodgy and old. Church people were mocked as being narrowminded and stuffy and to a certain extent the denominations had lost the joy aspect of worship with only the ritual remaining. The church's moral authority was gone so society, in many ways, lost the trust that government authority would be concerned about people's lives. That trust in human authority disappeared because a fair and impartial God was no longer overseeing the actions of the police, the justice system, the military or the government. I see parallels to today. How many people in Montana believe that the media are telling them honest, objective and unbiased news stories? How many believe that the outcome of a trial will be just rather than controlled by which party or president nominated the judge? How many believe that the military is a meritocracy that wouldn't shoot American citizens versus an ideologically controlled force? Those questions resonate because a living God has somehow been run out of America and western civilization.

The aftermath of the Vietnam era did have a revival of sorts. Chuck Smith, the Jesus freaks, Maranatha and Praise music all combined to give the church a reboot into an electronic and video existance, but I'm not sure the church ever definitively answered the questions raised in that time. The revolutionaries of the 60's were challenging the church with questions like: "Where's my heavenly defense when my country drafts me into a policy I don't want to be in?" "Where's the church when the police are harassing me for the color of my skin?" "Why is God saying I can't marry the person I love?" "If this is a free country, then why can't I have power over my own body?" For the revolutionaries the answer was: "There is no God, the government is like God so we will take over the government and then we will BE God."

In an earlier Letter to the Editor I compared the actions of these totalitarian revolutionaries to that of a virus and I stand by the idea. For the past sixty years the spirit of the 1960's has been infecting and embedding itself into every single institution we have, with the goal of removing the church from western society or at least making Jesus into an emasculated wimp who has no power to affect our lives. Unfortunately, in the 1960's the church did not have an answer to turn back the totalitarians. Faith in God is the answer, God does have a plan and we need to trust that he can get us through this. However, that faith is being attacked by the electronic media and the government that backs them and the spirit that is backing the government, so I wonder do we reclaim our faith and a country based on Jesus or does it all have to fall apart first?

Robert Wayman

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