Well, friends, it’s officially the one year anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine. And, frankly, I’m not sure how to celebrate this anniversary. Cake? Greeting cards? A watch party?
Now, I say this and right away, I’m sure many of you got your hackles up, you’re disgusted by the idea of having cake to celebrate the one year anniversary of the largest conventional war on European soil about 80 years. But what, exactly, was so offensive about what I said?
Because we still, a year later, have blue and yellow flags hanging from homes and businesses and on twitter-bios and facebook backgrounds. Is that the same as a greeting card? No, not exactly, but in some ways it’s more important because it’s more pervasive.
As far as having a watch-party, as though this war were a Super Bowl, you might find that offensive. But why? We’re supposed to consume these images, don’t ya know. That’s why we have all the clips of combat circulating on the news and on the internet. So, ah, I see; yep, now I get it. It’s TOTALLY OK to watch the brutality and horror of Ukrainians and Russians having their lives snuffed out, as long as you do it alone, or as a family. But the moment you invite over friends and have buffalo chicken dip it’s ghoulish.
Yeah, that dog won’t hunt.
I don’t buy that.
Now listen, I’m NOT saying that there’s not a difference between dispassionately or even compassionately watching images of war and getting’ the boys together to root for the -chenkos instead of the -ovskis. There is a difference.
But that’s not a difference that Big Media, in conjunction with Big Tech, supporting the Military-Industrial Complex want you to engage in. The powerful forces in our society don’t want you to view images of war and be disgusted and heartbroken and desirous of a rapid, peaceful resolution. No.
You’re supposed to see Javelin missiles take out T-90s and get up and cheer as if you were watchin’ Ezekiel Elliot running over the ‘Bama defense or into the endzone against Oregon back in 2014. You’re supposed to consume the Russo-Ukrainian War just like you’re supposed to consume everything else. You’re supposed to sit there and open you brain and let it all get shoved in there. Consume next product. That’s why you exist, don’t you know, you exist so you can consume next product, because next product is so much better than precious product or current product.
Our minds, our emotions, our souls are bombarded every waking moment of our lives with a ceaseless cannonade of vapid, vacuous, vain, venal, violent, and variable messages that attempt to break down any level of real and meaningful individuality and self-assertion. We are not being inspired to be wise, brave, competent citizens of a free republic. Rather we are being reduced to Pavlovian response mechanisms, infantilized, idiotized, and monetized to make us nothing but docile, pliant, pliable, and pitiable, drudges.
The wealthy and powerful do not want you thinking for yourself. They don’t want you cultivating a rich inner life. They don’t want you gardening, chopping firewood, going for long walks, reading the great books, having meaningful conversations. They don’t want you raising 9 kids in a small house with beat up old cars and no data plans on your phones. They don’t want you to get your kids out of government schools. They don’t want employees who will refuse to get the jab or wear the mask. They don’t want people who love and long for the good, the true, and the beautiful.
No.
They hate those people.
They hate those people and they want you to hate them. And if they can’t get you to hate them then you at least need to think they’re psychotics or religious nuts. I mean who would want to contemplate the transcendentals when there’s new product to consume?!
Who would want to spend their limited resources on the legacy and heritage of children when you could have the newest iphone instead!? Why read Shakespeare or Thackary, why listen to Tchaikovsky or Beethoven, why go to the opera or the ballet or the theatre when there’re Tik-Tok videos?!
Why would anyone need silence when there’s a whole world of deafening, mind-numbing, soul-destroying noise out there? a ceaseless din of sound slightly more coherent than static that can act as a soporific or even a narcotic, relieving you of the responsibility to contemplate your own existence? Why consider the reality and responsibility of being a free moral agent in a fallen world created by a loving God when you can be monetized and date-mined instead?!
Why wrestle with your children or talk with your friends or pray with your church or hold your wife’s hand when instead you can stare at a screen measured in square inches?
Why be a person when you can be a consumer?
Now, you might be thinking, “OK Lukey-poo, you sound like a smug elitist here.”
OK.
Don’t care.
I don’t care if I sound like an elitist, frankly, in our society I wear that as a badge of honor. I take it as a point of personal accomplishment that in a nation of zombified consumers of intellectual sewage I have the good taste and the good sense to say the obvious truths: Hamlets is better than Harry Potter; Bach is better than Bruno Mars; Chartres Cathedral is better than Corbusier; Enrico Caruso is better than Cardi B; Baryshnikov is better than Lizzie Howell; Charles Wesley is better than Chris Tomlin; Bernini is better than Banksy.
I don’t care if I sound like an agrarian idealist, frankly, in our society I wear that as a badge of honor. I take it as a point of personal accomplishment that in a nation of promiscuous, baby-murdering man-children and women-children that I have the wisdom to know and say the obvious. Children are better than childlessness; big families are better than small; rurality is better than urbanity; homes are better than apartments; marriage is better than friends with benefits; walks in the woods are better than video games; dogs, cats, cattle, pigs, chickens, horses, orchards and gardens are better than door dash; time spent with children and grandchildren and parents and siblings is better than time spent working for a faceless corporation.
I don’t care if I sound like a religious nut, frankly, in our society I wear that as a badge of honor. I take it as my bounden duty that in a nation of depraved, Satan-worshipping, porn-addled, drug addicted, godless fools I proclaim a Christ who died to pay for sinners such as us. Jesus is better. He’s better than everything and anything. And our nation needs Jesus.
Friends, right about now, you might be thinking…”OK, Luke, you devilishly handsome, silver-tongued, wordsmith you, that’s all brilliant and true and I totally agree with everything you say, but what on earth does this have to do with China and Russia being superbestfriends?”
Well friends, you see, all day, every day, you’re being subjected to psychological warfare. The powerful interests in this world are deeply interested in conditioning you to feel, think, and behave in certain ways. They have a significant vested interest in ensuring that you are very, deeply, earnestly concerned about which group of roided up millionaires push a leather ball past a painted grass line, but not quite so concerned with the centralization and accumulation of power. They want you very, deeply, earnestly worried about which CGI comic book hero in a CGI world can use CGI weapons to defeat CGI enemies to get the CGI McGuffin to stop the CGI apocalypse but they don’t want you worried about whether children are being sexualized and subjected to Munchausen Syndrome and Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy. They want you worried about whether Megan Rapinoe gets paid the same amount for playing soccer as people who are orders of magnitude better than her at playing soccer and not worried about collapsing literacy rates and mathematics scores. They want you worried about pronouns and deadnaming and not worried about train derailments. They want you worried about SUVs and ignoring private jets. They want you thinking about bottled water and ignoring the desertification we cause by poor water management. They want you to root for the people they say are good guys so that they can use that popular mandate to enrich themselves and gain more power.
I’m not saying Russia is right. I think Russia is wrong. But just because Russia is wrong doesn’t make the US or the West right. Just because Russia is wrong doesn’t mean that the West hasn’t been bear-baiting for decades. Just because Russia is wrong doesn’t mean that the US isn’t more interested in selling weapons to Ukraine, selling gas to Europe, and marginalizing Russia and China than the health, welfare, safety, and security of the Ukrainian people. Just because Putin did a bad thing doesn’t make us right just because we’re not Putin.
As the old saying goes, it takes two to tango. And you don’t need to be a Putin-stooge to say that while his invasion was wrong and evil, it’s not as though the history and politics of this whole thing are clear and simple. But that’s what powerful interests want you to think—if and when they want you thinking at all, which is rarely—they want you to think in simple, uncomplicated, and politically advantageous ways. Now, the simple and uncomplicated is easy; Americans have been undergoing intellectual programming for decades and at this point I doubt that the average American could logic their way out of a wet paper sack. But as for thinking in simple ways that are politically advantageous to the powerful and elite—well that takes some doing. When you turn your population into a gigantic baseball bat it’s going to be a blunt instrument nomatter who uses it—it just ain’t gonna be useful in brain surgery. The problem is who gets to wield it? Which demagogue will get to swing the lumber that is the American Public?
Frankly, I care a lot who gets to swing it.
But that’s not my primary concern, because if I had my druthers nobody but nobody would be making hay out of our sunshine. If I had my way this country would be a nation of careful thinking, wise, contemplative, sober, compassionate, and moral people who then exercise their political will in such a way.
But there’s only one way to have a nation like that.
Christ.
Only a nation that loves God will be a nation fit for freedom. Only a nation that loves Christ will be a nation that HAS freedom.
If you want to just be a consumer; if you just wanna be content with content then go ahead. eep consuming the new content; keep living a godless life; keep just being told to eat the bugs and drink the vinyl chloride—you’ll be fine. If that’s the life you want, then you can have it. And there’s gonna nobody that’s gonna try to stop you (well except me a few other weirdos).
But if you want to be free, if you want to be free to think for yourself, if you want to be free to live life on your own terms, if you want to be free to contemplate the good, the true, and the beautiful, if you want to be free to not be a slave to those who would enslave you, there is one and only one solution and that is Christ.
Only a nation that loves God will be a nation fit for freedom. And only a nation that loves Christ will be a nation that HAS freedom. Christ can set you free. Free to no longer be content with content.