dreams of my fathers

I have never lived in the America my father and grandfather knew. I was born in ’72 the year of Roe v. Wade. Before that time this country was a land founded on the principle of unalienable rights, among them, life. Before I was born this country asserted the right to live as being granted by the creator and therefore pre-eminent to the law and beyond the needs of society or the environment. I never knew that country.

The country I know does not acknowledge the creator. It worships self, convenience, and materialism. It owns no higher authority than personal opinion. We, my age-group peers and everyone younger, are all survivors of a holocaust. It is not less horrible because the victims have no voices; on the contrary it is worse. It is worse because its victims are innocent. It is worse because the cooperative killers are the doctors who are supposed to be sworn to save lives and mothers whose wombs should be havens but are become abattoirs. Our very lives were threatened from the moment our existence was known. Those of us who escaped the womb are here in the knowledge that many in our society would have killed us for a few bucks, or even volunteered to assist in our extermination.

Being birthed in this hostile environment affects one’s sense of self and one’s esteem of others. If such good and noble people as doctors and mothers can be killers is there any safe place left? We know that we are here not because of respect for the work of the Creator but simply because it was convenient, we were wanted, others were not, that’s all. When we look at society this is our lens and the results are visible in our delaminating culture. The disaffection of gen-x was created by the knowledge that something is wrong, and wanting it made right. The gen-x disaffection is giving way to the next generation that doesn’t know any other way and doesn’t know to ask for change.

The world of kill or be killed is normal to them. There has always been violence in schools but the fisticuffs of yesterday have given way to shootings today. This is survivor mentality. I am alive, that is all that matters. So long as I live no cause outweighs me. Ideas like duty, loyalty, and honor are meaningful as I assign meaning to them, or they are nothing. We are the holocaust survivors, we are our own cause.