The following is a lament of a native Iowan. However, it is likely shared by folks in many areas of America. Areas that have been destroyed by modernity. We read the history of this land we call America where there were lush plains and forests filled with wildlife. Soil that would grow anything. Pagans revered it. Christians were called to be husbandmen of it. Either/both responsible for its nurture and protection.
We have failed miserably. We’ve allowed giant corporations to rape the land and turn the small farmers and shopkeepers, those that have survived the onslaught, into slaves in the land they inherited. What soil has not eroded into the oceans has been poisoned with chemicals. Monocrops have replaced the diversity that sustains and balances the creatures of the land and further destroyed the beauty and fertility nature had provided.
It’s time for us to rebel against modernity with it’s ugliness, death, and destruction. The weapons we employ should be truth, beauty, and goodness. If we give our word we keep it. We make the space we occupy beautiful. We lend a hand and encouragement to our Folk. Homesteading, homeschooling, holistic healthcare. Reject the corporations. Frequent farmers markets and small family businesses. It’s up to each of us to do our part by doing the next right and honorable thing.
Will we be remembered as the parasites that destroyed the host and ultimately ourselves, or those who saved ourselves and restored balance, the good, the true, and the beautiful? Here follows the lament. We can do better.
Iowa is ruled not by politics, but by a managerial class of academic elites who know what’s good for you even if you don’t. Their whims dictate policy, the fields are under their collective control, the economy driven by their egos and international heralds. As the children of the void vanish from Iowa they are replaced by the immigrant servants and elitest successors from across the globe. A veritable babel of tongues crowds both classroom and cafeteria kitchen, while the foreign princelings lounge in their amusing provincial luxury. Their Arcadian picnics and powwows litter the promenades near crumbling limestone buildings across from the clustered crowd of beggars. They stare from within their properly purchased luxury at the sorrowful sorts who actually have to live there, until they return to their far better homeland or take their rightful place ruling over these plebian rubes. The population is composed of their debtor slaves the colleges produce and their equally bound progeny. These Hierophants of the Vacuous Void know the cities exist at their beck and call and what are all the other towns of Iowa but vassals of the urban arteries.
Inspiring, noble sentiments. Wrong eschatology. It will not happen in this age, and not for lack of trying. Yes, strive to be like this, but do not expect it to succeed. The Great Commission is to fish for souls, not transform the world into a fishpond.