The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,And miles to go before I sleep.
If you watched the Republican and Democratic National Conventions, you heard one promise after another by the two candidates. It would be a difficult and tedious exercise to keep a numerical count of all the promises the speakers made, all the speakers, including the two nominees. One candidate is promising free tuition to all in-state students whose families make less than $125,00 per year. In addition said candidate promises to make health care affordable to more people, in addition to equal pay, affordable child care, and paid family leave. By the official count of The Washington Post, the other candidate has made more than 76 promises. All those promises to keep and the candidates will go miles and miles before they sleep. It's exhausting, a wear and tear on body and soul.
Of course, you and I know from experience that they're not going keep all those promises; they can't; no one can. (Some they make, the President can't do by himself, like abolish the income tax.) But, every four years, people like to kid themselves and pretend they can. We keep looking for the Wizard of Oz, but he's not behind the curtain.
WHY ALL THE PROMISES?
That aside, I'd like for us to examine the fallacy that's the underpinning of all those at-least-for-the-moment-earnest-pledges.
Beneath all those promises is the philosophy that man's basic problem is his environment. It's the belief that a person does what he does and is what he is because of poverty, a lack of education, bad parenting, etc. and therefore, if we change the environment, we can change his character and shape his destiny.
All utopian schemes are built on that philosophy: change the environment and you change character and destiny. In other words, you can program people to be as you want them to be and the programing is done through changing the environment. (This is often a mistake of Christian schools--that the students' environment, if controlled tightly enough, can mold good Christians, sort of like an assembly line, and at the end of the conveyor belt is a good Christian.)
Karl Marx constructed his philosophy of communism on that premise. He told us that when we changed the environment to eliminate private property, then a Utopia on earth would come and man would live in harmony with the world and with others. Marx believed that the environment of private property made men bad.
BUT LISTEN TO DAVID H.
David Horowitz was a dedicated third generation communist who grew up in Brooklyn. His parents were educators who were members of a communist cell and so tight with others in the party that they were close friends with a woman who had a part in engineering the assassination of Trotsky.
When David was a boy, his father would take him for walks around the city; he would point out street names and tell David, "When the [communist] revolution comes to America, we'll change the name of that street."
But when David grew up, married, and had four children, he began to notice that the communist philosophy in which his parents had raised him had some serious problems and what helped to convince him of that was right under his nose, at home--his children.
David noticed, "The children we spawned were all so different in character and disposition that they posed a challenge to my radical worldview. [My] children were already so different than each other--Jon and Anne so aggressive and sociable, Benjamin so shy and emotional, Sarah so gentle and accommodating--that it was hard to see that our parenting had anything to do with these results.
"Each of them seemed to be distinct persons in embryo, even before they emerged to breathe the air. Observing my own children, I was compelled to acknowledge the potency of the human soul, the power of its DNA over my conscious efforts to create a progeny in one's own image. There was something irreducibly given in their characters which created an independence that you could not reach . . . You could encourage your children, set an example for them, provide them with opportunities and support, but you could not program them to a desired result."
SO THERE IT WAS!
So there it was, right under his nose, the God-designed refutation of his humanistic, utopian, and communistic philosophy that had led him into wasted years and years of dedicated service to the party's cause. The refutation had been there all along, built into every human being; he'd seen it all along--he's seen that his own children, having the same parents, the same home, the same upbringing, yes, the same environment, were different in personality, destiny, and disposition.
It is as Romans 1 says it is, the truth is written in our hearts and even in the starry heavens, but in their rebellion, unregenerate men will always be trying to suppress it. Nonetheless, like a beach ball we struggle to hold underwater, it will repeatedly keep surging toward the surface. We can choose to recognize it or keep fighting to submerge it.
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