I miss America, with whose ideals I was born and raised. Only yesterday it filled our hearts with boundless optimism, but Joe Biden now promises that America’s “darkest days … are ahead of us.”
I miss America, a land where sunny dreams came true, and we looked to the opening new frontier of space travel. Television was the window through which my generation watched “Star Trek,” which expanded our thinking about life and the universe.
In one episode, “The City on the Edge of Forever” by writer-friend Harlan Ellison, Starship Enterprise officers beam down to a planet racked by earthquakes and soon to break apart. The people of this world escaped through a time-machine into the past, a portal the ship’s temporarily-crazed Dr. McCoy leaps into and lands back on Earth in the early 1930s.
After McCoy reaches the past, Spock and Capt. Kirk discover that the Enterprise has vanished. They follow McCoy through the portal, find the woman of Kirk’s dreams, but learn that she is fated to be killed by a truck days later, at least in the history that led to their world.
But, in an alternate reality, McCoy saves her from the fatal accident. She becomes a peace activist who persuades President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to enter into peace negotiations rather than go to war against Adolf Hitler. Because of this, the Nazis develop the atom bomb first, conquer the world and create a future with no Starship Enterprise. To save the future, Kirk stops McCoy from snatching the woman out of death’s way.
“Jim! I could have saved her,” McCoy says angrily. “Do you know what you just did?”
“He knows, Doctor,” replies Spock. “He knows.” This idealistic peace advocate “was right,” says Spock, “but at the wrong time.”
As this “Star Trek” episode first aired, on April 6, 1967, a war against Communism raged in Vietnam. Decades later, leftists would hijack the Democratic Party, in 2020 set left-leaning cities ablaze with intimidating violence and looting, and with Communist China’s help, “win” a presidential election 47% of Americans believe involved major vote fraud.
I miss America and, like many of you, find myself retreating or escaping via time travel into a saner, less tremor-torn past by watching my old world via channels such as Turner Classic Movies (TCM). When will “The Bishop’s Wife” be on for Christmas? Next stop, “Willoughby.” OK Boomer.
I miss America and find it almost impossible to believe that we now irreconcilably seem to be two nations that will be separated by either secession or civil war. China might soon rule the world, creating a future without the Starship Enterprise.
We used to share Christmas, which embraced faith and the ultimate gift from God to humankind. Play is “the work of the child,” and this sacred day brought a lifetime of learning, understanding, responsibility and love.
One Christmas, around age 9 or 10, I got the gift I wanted most, a transistor radio. That night in our backyard I turned it on and heard a voice from 800 miles away say: “This is KOA, Denver.” Twenty years later, on book tour, I sat down in yet another radio station’s studio. Just before the interview started, a tape broadcast the words “This is KOA, Denver.” From the other end of the rainbow, I had become the voice a young boy was listening to 800 miles away. Such is life.
Today’s young protesters stand on less stable ground than we have. Leftists have taught them that there is no God and that, as Georgia Democratic Senate candidate Rev. Raphael Warnock says, Jesus was not a Jew but a Palestinian socialist. Their only remaining Christmas “god” is Santa Claus, giver of freebies.
Too many young people are taught not to grow up, but to remain infantile, government-dependent crybabies who selfishly use violence to get their way. They fear the reality that each of us has a sexually transmitted, always fatal condition called being alive for which the false “god” of government has no cure. Only the true God does.
Too many have been taught that socialism will create a man-made “heaven on Earth.” But socialism is only a system of wealth redistribution, not productivity; what happens when all the productive capitalists have been devoured, and utopia’s promised “free” goodies are gone? What happens when our bankrupt globalist rulers then declare us their serfs or slaves?
America endures in the hearts, minds and souls of at least 80 million of us. We need to thank God for His eternal present this Christmas.
Lowell Ponte is a former think tank futurist and retired Roving Editor at Reader’s Digest. He is coauthor, with Craig R. Smith, of “Money, Morality & the Machine: Smith’s Law in a Lawless, Over-Governed Age.” Ponte’s articles have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and major other publications.
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