Many children of divorce experience a kind of exile.  Although you are told your home has not shrunk, but expanded, it rarely feels that way.  Not only has the place you used to think of as home changed many of its rituals and rules, but it has altered how you are viewed and treated.  At first there is a sense of the newcomers not really knowing you, not knowing all your preferences or aversions and having to explain so many backstories from your past that clarify the present.  Then this graduates to not understanding you, your possibilities and limitations, where you need more guidance and where you need less.  Finally, this culminates in an indifference, or even exploitation, because step-relatives never did have that kind of bond in which your triumphs and suffering are theirs, also.

As the left topples statues, renames institutions, mocks patriotic symbol and rituals, and rewrites history, the American identity is being subject to a similar phenomenon.  The left wants to sever Americans from their history and their Founding Fathers — not just their flaws, but their ideas (notwithstanding their effectiveness in remedying those flaws) that form the foundation of our once largely self-governing, thriving country.  The left is essentially seeking to replace the Founders with its own woke socialist icons (specific names pending their definitive complete ascension to power) as your new Founding Fathers, the Stepfounders.

It is confounding how a country founded on the principle of limited government finds itself with the most powerful centralized government in world history, with strangulating tentacles everywhere, far beyond the original assignment of interstate commerce and foreign policy.  The Founding Fathers reassured the citizenry, as the Declaration of Independence states, "that to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."  Yet in that carefully considered, well intentioned commitment were the seeds of our decline.  For demagogues would stretch the definition of rights to absurdity, with one person's right becoming another's bondage, and greatly exaggerate dangers, requiring more protection and more power.

The need to protect against economic insecurity, political threats, and foreign menaces bred the welfare state, police state, and warfare state, respectively.  The Legislature legislated and taxed.  The Executive and Judiciary expanded, dabbling in some serious legislating of their own and spawning extra-governmental agencies and bureaucracies, far from scrutiny, accountability, and the consent of the governed.

Every statist encroachment exacts its price in terms of liberty.  There was the Civil War in which slavery became associated with states' rights and secession and nullification and thereby tainted important constitutional checks, the 16th and 17th Amendments (federal power lifeblood and critical state impediment to federal power removed), the Federal Reserve Act, the New Deal and Great Society, World Wars' parting gift of the military- industrial complex, the PATRIOT Act, and a stylish self-centered thin-skinned community-organizing president reorganizing government into a thinly veiled authoritarian centralized system styled in his own image.  The protectors and their propagandists continue to mislead with unfounded or inflated threats, whether climate hysteria or systemic racism or rampant sexual harassment or domino theories or market-induced income inequality.

Individual responsibility deteriorates into a collective concept, with the burdens of responsibility redistributed in proportion to one's status as either a ruling class or officially recognized victim class member.  Achievers share their credit ("you didn't build that") with preferred class influencers, while wrongdoers share their blame with disfavored class influencers, however tenuous such influences are.  Financial responsibilities spread from "oppressor" to "oppressed."  Even the sacred act of voting becomes a communal act, instead of the historically mandated private act free from influence.  Justice is allotted based on the preferred classes' political objectives, justifying the conviction of innocent dissenters (innocent until proven un-woke).  The individual becomes a means to an end, an end built on fantasies of nebulous utopias and existential threats.

Ultimately, the protection the government offers is not to protect the people from the powerful, but to protect the powerful from the people.  The protectors have become the predators and parasites from whom there is no protection.  The centralized power has captured the government branches meant to check and balance, incapacitated the states, clogged the markets, and corrupted the media and academia.  The indoctrinated, debased secular culture is no longer largely self-governing and resistant to the central planning of that "little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital."  We have become a people for the government, by the government, of the government.  And the diminished individuals, believers in the Founders' vision, are increasingly censored, misunderstood, exploited, scapegoated, and eventually exiled into servitude in their own homes, like the archetypal fairy-tale stepchildren at the mercy of that meritless authority, which folklore presents as an odd hybrid, part nanny and part tyrant (notwithstanding many excellent stepparent exceptions that archetypes are understandably too busy aggregating to note).

Lurking beneath the optimistic silliness and simplicity of the fairy tale are deeper wisdoms and timeless truths.  As G.K. Chesterton observed, "the baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination.  What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon. ... That these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear."  So too America, who has her own George and something stronger than tyranny afoot, insisting another chapter for America is still possible.

The gap between the powerful rulers and the powerless people was so great that the government had magic powers.  The wicked politicians and their judges, bureaucrats, and propagandists could turn the lawless and corrupt into heroes, the hardworking law-abiding into outlaws, the talentless and depraved into admired wealthy elites, and the earnest industrious achievers into outcasts.  They even had bubble machines that turned paper into gold.  But the spirit of the Founders would inspire their spiritual offspring, reminding America's patriots who they were, their purpose, their principles, the exceptionalism they were capable of but which grows only in freedom; providing them with the strength necessary through the many challenges and trials ahead. For it is difficult to build goodness, easy to destroy it; easy to build wickedness, difficult to destroy it.  America's glorious history became the treasure map American's children used to retrace their steps and find those breadcrumbs to where they had come from and how they had come to such a wicked place and how they would find their way back home, the great undoing and reversing.  A radical decentralization began, dismantling the power of the central tyranny while re-building those smaller polities — neighborhoods, schools, places of worship, cities, counties, states — restoring civil liberties, representation, and choice.  "The governed must consent" became "the consent of the governed" once again.  The iron fist was replaced with the invisible hand and blind justice.  Because the memory of the brutalities and witch hunts of the previous tyranny was so fresh, the people were ever more vigilant in safeguarding their liberty against an all too powerful central authority.  And America's children rejoiced once again in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happily ever after.

Image: JSMed via Pixabay, Pixabay License.