How to Keep From Losing Your Mind by Deal Hudson

Author:Deal Hudson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: TAN Books

Lessons of the Past

Despots come in all varieties. They can take the form of violent protestors who succeed in keeping some speakers off college campuses, as has become common in the last decade. Physical violence has become common at such protests, and this criminal activity has not been discouraged by politicians and police commissioners who order the police to stand down. More recently, left-wing senators playing to TV cameras viciously shamed a Supreme Court nominee for unsubstantiated accusations of sexual assaults to keep a perceived conservative from a seat on the court.

For now, the reader can get a general idea by observing how the use of power is justified by those who claim greater enlightenment and moral purpose than the rest of us. One example is how LGBTQ programs in public education are implemented over the objections of parents and church groups.13 Polling supplies the numbers to justify these programs: According to a 2013 survey by GLSEN, a national nonprofit focused on providing safe educational spaces for LGBTQ students, just 5 percent of LGBTQ students reported having health classes that included positive representations of LGBTQ-related topics.14

It doesn’t matter if parents don’t want “positive representations” of LBGTQ relationships because it contradicts their religious values. Whatever occurs at the top of society among the leaders in the academy, media, politics, and business can happen at any level below, all the way down to the family and various relationships. The temptation to dictate how others should think and act is promoted by forms of education that attempt to crush our freedom of mind.

In 1953, the playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005) wrote The Crucible in reaction to the McCarthy hearings, the government harassment of people accused of having been members of the Communist Party. The hearings had led to a “Hollywood Blacklist,” an agreement among major studios to not knowingly employ a Communist or anyone associated with a group trying “to overthrow of the government of the United States.” As a result, prominent actors, directors, and screenwriters lost their income and their future. The revered Charlie Chaplin was forced to leave the United States in 1952 and vowed never to return. In retrospect, we can see McCarthy was exactly right about the infiltration of Soviet spies into the US government, even if his tactics went well beyond what was necessary and people were unnecessarily hurt.15

Miller’s play compares anti-Communists with those caught up in the Salem witch trials of 1692. Miller’s sympathies at the time were with the Communists. Regardless of the ideologies of Miller or McCarthy, The Crucible depicts how hysteria can sweep through a community fueled by this man’s envy or that man’s ambition. Miller’s characters are modeled on figures taken from Salem’s historical accounts: a frustrated, lonely clergyman tries to discover why his daughter will not eat and stumbles upon an incident that will ignite the witch hunt: Four teenage girls dancing in the dark woods, each trying to deny it, cover it up, and blame others for being there. In the late

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