I guess this is as good a place as any for this, which resonates with me quite a bit.
This Year I'm Just Not In the Mood for Life, Liberty, and All That
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/p ... -the-mood/
"Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we begin by declaring that "all men are created equal." We now practically read it "all men are created equal, except negroes." When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read "all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics." When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty-to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be taken pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy."
-Abraham Lincoln to Joshua Speed, August 24, 1855
[...]
When I was young, I was part of the last generation of altar boys who had to memorize the calls and responses of the Latin Mass. I learned to pronounce the words phonetically, the way Scandinavian rock-and-roll singers learn to perform in English. Of course, very often, I didn't have the faintest idea what I actually was saying. Only later, when what one of our bishops called, "the vulgar vernacular" replaced the Latin did I understand what I had been saying in church for two years.
(By the way, "vulgar vernacular"? Shakespeare? Dickens? Mark Freaking Twain? I didn't think much of that bishop, even though he was a friend of the family.)
That's how I feel, reading the [preamble to the Declaration of Independence] these days. I'm reading words in another language, rote, without a proper translation. Words that mean no more to me now than "totiusque ecclasiae suae sancti" meant to me in all those 7 a.m. Masses in the winter, when it was still dark outside. Words I could say only because I memorized them.
This isn't a loss of faith. This isn't a loss of hope. I still believe in every word of the Declaration's "nut graf," as they used to say in J-School. But in the year of our Lord 2023, I'm with Lincoln on this. The "base alloy of hypocracy (stet)" is a shining vein running through the events of the day.
Life? We cannot do anything about the carnage ensuing from the country's insane affection for its firearms; there were two mass shootings in three days over this holiday weekend.
Liberty? A word that's been twisted beyond all reckoning. Moms For Liberty quote Hitler and strip school libraries. The Supreme Court makes a decision based on nothing, based on air, in which a woman refuses a service she doesn't provide to a gay couple that doesn't exist, all in the name of religious "liberty."
The pursuit of happiness? God bless the millions of small acts of charity that are performed on behalf of our fellow citizens. But does anyone really believe that we're all pulling in the same direction on that one? Our gay and trans fellow citizens under attack? The Supreme Court throwing a financial deadweight back on millions of young people. The former president* back on top of the Republican party?
The truth of the matter is that the Declaration in its fullness scares the hell out of us. Our commitment to the full measure of its promise never has been weaker. I remember the midsummer of 1968, after the assassinations, and with Soviet tanks poised to crush the reform movement in Prague and cops preparing to bust heads in the streets of Chicago. Things were coming apart. Our commitment to what the country was supposed to be was wavering. But it was nothing like I feel today. This time, there's a general, dull ache in the soul, and a rising suspicion that we fell for the longest con of all.
