-Jonathan Swift
15 year old: “In a book I was reading by John Bunyan, The Holy War, there were different representations of the different names of the devil and they were all working together. There was Lucifer…Satan….”
13 year old: “…. and Justin Trudeau…”
I'm a hardened cynic when it comes to politics. Heck, I didn't even vote in the last election (during covid) because everyone running in my area, including the so-called "conservatives," supported the vaccine mandates and restrictions. And I wasn't rewarding that, no matter how much I despise the Liberals and Trudeau. But I sometimes wonder what the generation coming up now is going to make of our political scene. Because you've got a lot of them who have been trained to accept and obey whatever their authority figures- ie. the government- tell them, slavishly accepting rights violations without question, nodding approvingly at dissenters being ostracized and punished... even signing on to all the gender woo nonsense. And then you've got the ones who were on the receiving end of all these abuses of authority and rebelled against them, resent what happened and those who caused it. They're much more cynical at a much younger age than I was. It seems to me that we're heading into a future without a lot of middle ground, where there are those who regard the government as their parent (or god) and then those who hold it in contempt. This can't be healthy, but what's to be done? I'd say the wisest thing is to build strong families and communities- such as with your local church- to rely on, ignore the government as much as possible, and push back against it when you have to. In the words of GK Chesterton: "Only men to whom the family is sacred will ever have a standard or a status by which to criticize the State. They alone can appeal to something more holy than the gods of the city."
― John Bunyan, The Holy War