According to H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, in the year 802,701, no one will have any inkling that you ever existed.  All historical memory will have been lost.  If you think that that is fiction, you are of course correct, but if you think it is nothing but fiction, then take a look around you at the present.  Few of us know the names of our great-grandparents. 

As a great-grandfather myself, I do in fact have the vaguest notion of who my own great-grandparents were, but only the vaguest.  Some were peasants; some were landowners; some were soldiers; others were outlaws.  Some were kind and gentle, some brutal. 

Go back four more generations before them, and they might as well have lived 802,701 years ago, for all I know of them.  Yet they were real people, with real struggles, real hopes and dreams, real successes and real failures.  They are lost to history, forgotten, anonymous. 

Today, young people have little or no idea who they themselves are.  They don't know from where their identity comes.  Our identities come from history, from the long and arduous path across centuries, where the milestones are the events that shaped our culture.  It is those events which define for us how we enumerate our rights and responsibilities.   

Those pathways are battlefields strewn with the fallen corpses of soldiers and camp followers.  They are the plowed furrows of planted fields, watered not only by rain, but also by sweat.  They are the dank monasteries in which, handwritten by candlelight, wisdom was imparted to us generation by generation. 

All of that is being forgotten, and much of it is already lost. 

My late father fought in World War II against real, actual fascists.  Today, woker-than-thou, arrogant spoiled brats with college degrees have no idea of the sacrifices he, along with his many bands of brothers across the globe, made to preserve their freedoms.  Not only is their ingratitude abysmal, but they even go so far as to revile him for his beliefs in God and country, and they refer to his generation, born of the Great Depression and blooded in war, as the fascists. 

Unwilling to open their history books, instead, they read propaganda if they read at all; they cannot open their minds to the times in which we live.  To merely mention an idea with which they disagree is to "trigger" them, and to close off analysis.  Their idea of discussion is to shout down others. 

They don't know what World War II was all about, or even when it occurred, much less who were the belligerents.  Nor do they care.  The ignorance of these products of woke education is not only appalling, but downright lethal to our future prospects as a free people. 

Is this what the Bible speaks of when it foretells a generation that has no respect, in which evil is rewarded and virtue is punished? 

Efforts are being made to educate the very youngest as to our history, but I fear that between them and us is a lost generation which has been led astray.  America may have to wander in a desert for forty years before the children being born today might lead us toward the ideals our Founders envisioned for us. 

Let us pray that in the year 802,701, the people alive then will remember — if not us, then at least the noble ideals that give us a treasured identity that transcends time. 

Image: Frank R. Paul.