Whew!
Just as it appeared we were about to careen over a woke cliff into a neo-Marxist abyss and oblivion, our once-fired "driver" got his job back, slammed on the breaks, and did so just in the nick of time to avert seemingly certain disaster.
Still, that sudden jolt has left this writer with admitted confusion, as I now experience some of those near-death flashbacks that we often hear about — images that had so recently come to be accepted by many as a "new normal."
Take, for example, a guilt I was supposed to own as a chance result of being born as a white male who has been unfairly rewarded, as with others of my privileged ilk, for merit-worthy achievements.
That was even before during his first day in office President Joe Biden issued a seemingly reasonable and compassionate executive order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities, which institutionalized "equity" as a trigger term many of us hadn't bargained for.
Notice, for example, that the order didn't refer to advancing racial equality — the bedrock principle enunciated by America's founders in the second paragraph of our nation's Declaration of Independence: ''We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.''
Differences between equality and equity are fundamental and crucial: differences between assuring equal opportunities and equal outcomes, between equal treatment under the law and fingers on scales of justice, between unbiasedly judging people's behaviors and achievements as individuals or stereotypically as members of groups, between rewarding those who strive for achievements and those who don't.
Most Americans I know generously recognize a fair and moral responsibility to provide assistance to all poor and disadvantaged citizens who urgently need temporary or sustaining help.
Most people in my flashback really didn't care about gender-identity preferences or behaviors, whether biological or intimate relationship choices.
Nor did they contemplate allowing government overreach to set the rules, as in sexually transformative surgery for children or genetically incompatible mixed female sports competition and public bathrooms.
In the America I remember, the citizens and our government representatives, most particularly, shared common pride and gratitude to live in a melting-pot country that celebrates racial and cultural diversity — one with a history that has fought and sacrificed life and treasure to protect the rights of all who subscribe to precepts of equal opportunities without regard to economic status, family origin, or religious moorings.
This patriotic notion became disabused and displaced through federal government-sanctioned introduction of critical race theory and revisionist 1619 Project K-12 education and military indoctrination programs that portray America as an existentially racist country — one that inexorably divides all individuals into antagonistic "oppressor" and "victim" classes.
In my flashback, the very concept of America as a sovereign nation secured by borders was taken for granted rather than challenged as anti-globalist exclusionism.
Here, governance as a democratic republic by "will of the people" was assumed limited to refer to those who are legally qualified as voting citizens to choose leadership at all levels: federal, state, county, and municipal.
A requirement to show proof of citizenship to cast ballots seemed entirely reasonable and necessary to ensure that legal votes aren't nullified en masse by illegitimate fraudsters. Any claim that such a fundamental safeguard places disproportionate burdens on one group versus another would have been considered absurd and racially derogatory.
I could have never imagined during earlier flashback times when the American justice system could become so corruptively and transparently weaponized along partisan lines against disfavored opinions and political candidates.
We witnessed parents investigated as prospective terrorists for school board protests over age-inappropriate materials being taught to elementary school students, an armed pre-dawn assault on the private residence of a former president and first lady for possession of classified documents, and arrests of others for quietly praying outside an abortion clinic.
Assaults on fair and balanced justice included clear evidence of election tampering as the FBI concealed evidence of alleged Biden family foreign influence peddling and tax evasion found on Hunter Biden's "laptop from hell," which 51 former Justice Department intel officials falsely dismissed as Russian disinformation.
And just as it seemed that almost everything most of us have cherished as bedrock American values and structures were undergoing irreversible destruction and a national reawakening because of it, our majority electorate reestablished proven leadership to restore and rekindle fresh hopes for an even brighter future than before.
Having remarkably survived two failed impeachments; nearly countless lawsuit attempts to remove him from state ballots, bankrupt him, brand him as a felon, and imprison him; and two assassination attempts; President Donald Trump was not only reelected but enjoys enormously broad popular support.
As another great American leader, President Ronald Reagan, reminded us: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream.
"It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free."
Let whiplash from the recent collision with neo-Marxist tyranny remind us how close we came to insane abandonment of this precious freedom so recently taken for granted, with renewed resolve to pass that hard-fought lesson by example to another generation.
Larry Bell is an endowed professor of space architecture at the University of Houston where he founded the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture and the graduate space architecture program. His latest of 12 books is "Architectures Beyond Boxes and Boundaries: My Life By Design" (2022). Read Larry Bell's Reports — More Here.
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