We all have some strange personal habits. Mine is that I like to eat certain candies while traveling. Long car rides belong to a 20 oz. regular Coca-Cola and a tube of Sprees. Original hard Sprees, not the chewy ones. Those are from Satan. An airline flight, on the other hand, requires a small bag of gummy bears.
So seeing boxes of salted crickets – ACTUAL bugs, not a candy shaped like them – in the airport candy store as I perused looking for my favorite brand of gummy bears was a bit of a jarring experience for me. It prompted some existential pondering. “Bear” (see what I did there?) with me for a moment.
As I saw some vain attempt to make dead bugs look like a delicious treat juxtaposed against my delicious gummy bears, I considered all of the oblivious humans completely unaware of the implications of this. The gravity of this picture wasn’t lost on me. As a student of history and human nature, I considered that this moment in the candy store would be one that I would look back on in the last days of my life and contemplate how nothing was the same in my world after that moment. It was like a Dickensian “Ghost of Dystopia Future.” Unless something radically changes, these are shadows of things that will be.
For whatever complaints I have, I will have lived in a unique time. I will have crossed from the peak of the modern iteration of the Roman Empire into the depths of depravity. Unless something changes radically, I will have done many things that I will explain to future generations that they won’t understand. “What do you MEAN you used to fly wherever you wanted once per week! You must have been STUPID rich”.
But it will be worse. I will hear kids bragging that they had to steal to enjoy the salted crickets from the store as a special “treat” while regular kids have to eat the unsalted ones from the floor. I will tell them of places called airports where there were stores every few hundred feet packed from floor to ceiling with wonderful things called “candy.” I will relate how it was just “normal”. And the kids will all laugh at me and think, “He’s a crazy old man! The world was never like that!
No Unifying Principles
The argument has been made that we all disagree on what “Constitutionality” means because none of us have ever lived under a static code of social norms. Auron MacIntyre proposed that we are living under the “Fifth Constitution.” And while I won’t reiterate his arguments here, you can find them on his YouTube and media channels. I see explanatory merit in his theses.
First, he observes that we can’t have “unity” because we have no unifying principles. Whether one agrees with it or not, the Bible says that, “There was no king. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Seems familiar. During the time of the Judges, Israel couldn’t form a cohesive society, and without capital-P Principles, neither can we.
Unfortunately, we have accepted a weird amalgam of the religion of Self and Marxism. Our post-modern theology teaches that reality is defined by the feelings of the individual. Worse, we have a culture shot through with false religion, being unable to stand against it. The Church will stand against the gates of Hell, but the false Church is largely an irrelevancy to be judged.
Because of this, secondly, there is no prophetic voice calling the World back to absolute truth. Half the people are shocked that someone might not care enough about women to allow any woman to kill a baby woman, while simultaneously being unable to define what a woman is. The other half equally idolizes comfort. They just want the “leave-me-alone” version of selfishness. They watch the fires rage outside their door and sit angrily on their couch imagining that it won’t burn their house to the ground.
MacIntyre and others have pointed out that no document ever defends itself. It is, therefore, impossible for a people who have never taken the time to understand what the Founders believed and understood to return to a “constitutionality” that produces anything resembling what they had. It requires hard work and sacrifice. But a generation of people is consumed with their own comfort.
“Churchianity” in America, as religious people were in Jesus’ day, is evidently more concerned with “a following” and credentials and not rocking the socio-political boat as those Pharisees were than it is with teaching immutable truth to the World as salt and light.
Jesus said that His disciples would be known by their fruit. The failure of the Western Church to stand for Truth in meaningful ways is pretty rotten fruit. Jesus said that if people are ashamed of Him before men, they are not His people. In the current culture, people are seeking Truth from God’s Word from gay bloggers and atheist professors who don’t even believe in that God and the Pharisees of the West are arguing over how to look pious and whether we should burn books when the man they idolized commits adultery.
The End if Crunchy
This may all sound pretty radical to you, and I am unsurprised. But as I look at the crickets for sale and ponder a future where I will know kids who will mock me for telling tall tales about a glorious past full of gummy bears for all, I consider that for those trapped in Plato’s cave (other books the failed public education system doesn’t teach) thought the messenger sounded radical to them, too. There comes a point of inflection where sanity begins to seem insane. So be it. I would rather be thought of as insane in an insane world than loved by fools.
As it turns out, the end of the World as we have known it comes not with a bang or even a whimper.
It doesn’t even come with the sound of crickets.
Because they’re salted.
