In his famous poem “The Second Coming,” written in 1919 regarding the end of World War I and its aftermath, the Irish poet W. B. Yeats wrote these memorable lines, “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.”  I doubt if our country has reached a similar apocalypse. But all the same, many signs portend the serious crises our country is facing right now: The politicians’ and media pundits’ vehement cry for the downfall of the country, calling it racist and shameful; the rampant and violent urban crimes that threaten the daily lives of innocent citizens; the radical socialists’ self-righteous call to release students’ financial burden and wipe out their debts; the unprotected southern border that daily witnesses hundreds of illegal trespassers invading our sovereign country.  The list goes on, yet our leaders who are elected and paid to protect us choose to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that business is as usual.   

The cry that the United States is a racist country reverberates, from the leaders at the top to the media pundits, the radical groups, the white liberals, and those downtrodden at the bottom who place their failures to the country and refuse to accept their personal responsibility. Plus, they try hard to push such extreme and destructive ideologies to our schools by forcing them to learn CRT to despise and hate our country from an early age.               

While the liberals and the leftists launch a collective and desperate attack against our country and all it stands for, they launch another fierce movement nationwide to defund the police and defend the violent and repeated criminals. They would resort to all sorts of excuses -- racial, economic, mental, and historical -- to relieve criminals of due punishment or just let them go, the result of which is criminals run wild and wreak havoc to our cities, communities, and families.                

Take Chicago as an example. In 2019, there were 2147 gun shootings and 500 gun deaths; in 2020, 3261 shootings and 772 deaths; in 2021, 3561 shootings and 797 deaths; in 2022, by the end of June, 1255 shootings and 310 deaths. Yet shootings are not the only crimes criminals commit; they also engage in thousands of carjackings, robberies, shopliftings, lootings, assaults, with few consequences.  According to NBC Chicago, in 2021, one year after hundreds of businesses in Chicago, including those upscale shops on the Magnificent Mile, were looted in 2020, the Cook County State's Attorney's Office only approved 392 looting cases; only 33 cases made it through the courts; only 26 individuals received probation; only seven ended up in jail.  The same crimes and light-to-no-punishments to criminals go on in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and many medium and small towns.    

When business owners worry if their businesses are at risk of being looted at any moment; when ordinary citizens are robbed, beaten, and shot or even killed when they walk on the streets or their neighborhoods, when the public transportation becomes a haven for criminals to rob and assault passengers; when criminals keep repeating crimes only to be rereleased and continue to destroy the community, when governors,  mayors, and police commissioners throw their hands in the air and complain to citizens that they can do nothing about the crimes, what is the future of our neighborhoods, cities, and our country?               

The majority of people understand that stealing, looting, killing, breaking into other people’s properties, and refusing to pay the debts you owe are not right. The Bible has many verses about hard work and self-reliance. Ephesian 4:28 writes, “Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Psalm 128:2 states, "You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be blessed, and it shall be well with you."              

Understand also such mad ideologies and happenings are not normal and do not occur in the majority of countries, either; they are sheer chaos, madness, dysfunction and incompetence in our land, and the United States must own them and take immediate and decisive action to solve them. To send condolences, to pray, and to visit the victims after each massacre will not help rid of the gun violence and mass shooting problems; implementation of policies will; holding the officials who refuse to enforce the law will!                

Even though we face insurmountable challenges, and many of our government agencies are dysfunctional and fail our citizens miserably, I still have faith in America as a new naturalized citizen,  and I am still encouraged day by day by the brave politicians like Senator Joe Manchin who is nonpartisan and has the courage to call stop to the mad spending of this incompetent and wasteful government, by senators like Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley who courageously take clear and strong positions on the country’s issues like election, spending, crimes, border security, by hundreds of brave parents who insist on having a say in their children’s education and who have delivered a clear and sound “no” to CRT that preoccupies itself with race and brainwashes our children to despise our country, its history and the great achievements it has achieved even though there is still much it can do to realize its full potential.    

It is time for all Americans to wake up and realize that we face a series of serious crises at home, and things, having been of control for decades, are now deteriorating to an alarming point.  We do not wish to see our country get to the stage of “Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.” Unless we take these problems seriously and start to tackle them, the future of our country, you and your families is in peril.

If our government officials put their party and personal interests aside and put our country’s business at the center, if our leaders, business executives, and employees all perform their work in a competent and effective manner, if our parents fulfill our responsibilities to our spouses and children, and if our children commit to their education and do their best to learn both their disciplines and civic responsibilities, our country will revert course and get back to normal, and the United States will again be that beacon of light upon a hill, bringing democracy, liberty, and hope to the world.   

Image: Picryl