Fans of the popular police spoof movie “The Naked Gun” will recall the scene where the hero cop, Leslie Nielsen – following up on his acclaimed deadpan performance in “Airplane!”, hauls off and decks a Hare Krishna who approaches him in an airport. We all laughed and cheered at this because obviously those bald, be-robed pushers of peace, love, and understanding are super-annoying and totally deserve an ass-kicking. At any time – under any circumstances.
For those of us who grew up in the later part of the former century, that joke packs a wallop I think because of the creeping fear many of our parents had that their children, growing up largely unsupervised in a more permissive society than they every dreamt of, would be lured into joining a cult! – Hare Krishna, hippie commune, Moonies, Goonies, Manson Girls, 7th Day Adventists… whatever. It was sort of the boogie man of our generation, and it didn’t matter if the hook was drug-fueled, sexual, or religious ecstasy – it always masked something nefarious and exploitative. We heard tales of kids “rescued” from cults with extreme prejudice at the behest of desperate, loving parents. Long before the age of the personal computer, the term “de-programmer” had become lodged in popular culture.
Now those kids are grown and in a truly tragic irony of history it is our parents who have joined a cult. A cult of exclusion. A cult of violence. A cult of hate.
Inexplicably, so many leaders and role models of our youth, men and women who stood for us as the embodiment of civil society, respect for authority, law and order, of doing the right thing – teachers, doctors, lawyers, police, elected officials, preachers – now appear to have utterly abandoned those principles, discarding them like dime store Halloween masks.
And for what? What values are we to put in place for those cast aside? What can we look to as our guiding star in these dark times?
Remember the “thousand points of light”? The poetic idea that local organizations across the country, “communities of faith” in particular, would step up and provide safety-net social services as the Federal government cut funding for those programs? Supporters of this vision painted pictures of a glittering, jeweled tapestry of good intentions weaving the nation together. A lovely description for what amounted to a massive de-investment in lower- and middle-income American families, homes, towns, schools, infrastructure, etc. Church groups and private philanthropy would, of course, fill in the gap. America is a fundamentally caring nation, so the reasoning went, naturally we’d all pitch in – at the local level – to care for each other.
Forward to the present and zoom in on the image. The tapestry looks different. Now the “points of light” are torches borne by an angry white mob bent on destruction and retribution, while the very notion of a compassionate society caring for those in need is openly and viciously derided as the detestable, unforgivable, liberal crime of “wokeness”.
Communities of Faith seem largely, sadly, silent in this tumult – complicit or co-opted in the scramble for secular power. In Congress the cult zealots, taking a page out of Orwell, are openly, shamelessly working to redefine acts of lawless violence, contempt for authority, graffiti smeared in feces on the walls of our nation’s capitol, as “patriotic” for the official historical record. Insanity! Closer to home, Grandpa is telling Grandma to pipe down if she takes issue with anything the dear leader says.
Let’s go back to that scene in the airport and consider what it was that terrified our parents so much about Hare Krishnas and the like. Were they afraid their children would adopt a world view they simply wouldn’t recognize, and that the values they held true and tried to pass on would no longer be respected? I wonder if they can imagine how it feels for us now to watch them subjugate themselves in the service of an individual who holds nothing sacred – to witness them pledge absolute loyalty to a man so demonstrably vile that back in the day us kids probably wouldn’t have even been allowed in the same room with him for any length of time. We remember. Common decency used to be important.
My parents are in a cult. There’s no denying it. They may not be out there chanting, “Lock HER up!” Build a Wall!” or “Immigrants are Poisoning the Blood of America!”, but they’re willing to let those things slide and give their moral and financial support to the axe-grinders. Do they believe something better is bound to emerge after everything burns to the ground?
In contrast, the Hare Krishna mantra is chanted as a petition to God, and its meaning can be interpreted as “Oh Lord, oh energy of the Lord, please engage me in your service.”
–OP 2/11/24
Summary Judgements by Officer Phil 