When will we ever "get it?" There are simple solutions to most problems, but we refuse them in search of a more elegant and less effective way. If only the people of Charlottesville had asked the question, three dead would be alive today.

Human lives are not lived, experienced or endured so much as they are built by an innumerable series of choices, decisions and responses to consequences.  We often marvel at the grand spectacle of the lives of the rich and famous who have amassed great fortunes or glowed brightly in public notoriety.  But we also gawk at terrible human tragedies where others have risen to incredible heights only to crash in fiery destruction at the end.

In the past, in order to prepare children for successful and rewarding lives with purpose, schools taught language to help them communicate effectively and theology, that they might learn wisdom and humility.  Students were also taught mathematics, science and industry to help them develop an understanding of the divine order of the world they would one day enter as adults. 

Teachers knew that a studious look at history would help them avoid the terrible and costly mistakes of prior generations, and find their particular places in the world.  They understood that teaching the foundational principles of government would help them to become responsible citizens and guardians of freedom.  But all that began to change about fifty years ago.

Today, schools are not teaching the same things and students are not learning in the same ways.  Instead, schools are presenting agenda-driven science intended to inculcate students into the controversial fallacies of climate change and environmental fanaticism.  They deceitfully push the counterfeit theory of evolution in biology and anthropology classes despite having no legitimate scientific evidence to support it, erasing the faith of the weak and igniting the sordid passions of the ignorant.

Public schools and secular universities dutifully teach principles of socialism and moral relativism in pursuit of miserable unworkable liberal politics, and indoctrinate children into all forms of deviant sexuality.  Students have learned these lessons well to their own injury and their parents’ sorrows. 
 
All throughout our lives, each of us has the ability to make course corrections and most of us do.  When an idea, philosophy or activity becomes personally or publicly destructive, anyone can abandon it in order to achieve something better.  But only if the person is honest enough to ask himself the most important question, “Could I be wrong?”  The inability to ask this question, keeps people bound on a course of self-destruction and personal ruin, sometimes, for life. 

The turmoil and hate that rages in America’s cities today, demonstrates that large numbers of people are either unable or unwilling to ask the most important question.  Those who are right cannot and should not be persuaded that they are wrong.  But today, those who are wrong refuse to imagine the possibility, even with mountains of evidence before their faces.  As a result, there is no longer any common ground on which a majority of Americans can unite and stand.

As a popular song once declared, “There is none so blind as he who will not see.”  It’s as true today, as ever it has been.  We wouldn’t dare to refer to these as fools, because our ethos would condemn such a statement as “mean.”  But Solomon did.  In America now, there is a mindless militant defiance in a growing segment of our population that cannot be reasoned with, placated or appeased even though its pernicious effects upon individuals and our survival as a nation are obvious and predictable. 

In our personal lives, pain and loss are often the powerful catalysts that lead to change.  But as long as people are determined to seek political solutions to mitigate the consequences of moral failure, no progress can or will be made.  Our leaders are often like physicians who treat the symptoms of diseases, habitually neglecting the microbes that cause them. 

America lacks a unifying purpose.  As long as great numbers of us are unwilling to ask the most important question, turmoil, strife and conflict are sure to continue.  Meanwhile, violence like that which cost the lives of three people in Charlottesville, Virginia on Saturday will become more common, and the defiant will persist in seeking to blame their ideological opponents in order to avoid asking, “What if we are wrong?”