Can We Turn Back Our Clocks One Generation This Sunday?

November 2, 2023

At 2:00 am this coming Sunday, November 5, Daylight Saving Time ends, and so we are to turn back our clocks one hour to 1:00 am. That’s not enough! I plead for us to be able to turn back time much more! We have been experiencing in the 2020s the rapid decline of society with multiple nations at war, corrupt American government officials, a two-faced and disordered justice system, absurd and depraved sexual morals, and a Catholic Church with some lukewarm (at best) and heretical (at worst) clergy and laity. Is there any way we can turn our clocks back not just one hour this Sunday, but one generation?

A generation is typically considered to be about a 30-year period. If we go with that definition and turn back our clocks one generation this Sunday, we would find ourselves in November of 1993. Let’s reflect on how less evil, perverted, and idiotic society was in 1993…

• The only abbreviation students learned in school 30 years ago besides “the ABCs” was “USA.” Schools these days set aside academics so they can indoctrinate students with secularism and liberalism represented by the initials, “DEI,” “BLM,” “BIPOC,” “SEL,” and the ever-increasing alphabet of perverse and nonsense terminology – “LGBTQIA2S+.”

• We had a 47-year-old American president a generation ago instead of today’s 80-year-old one. No matter your politics, you have to admit that a nation is usually in better hands if their leader is not feeble or senile.  

• In 1993 we saw the first Black woman to fly in space, the first Black woman to earn the Novel prize in literature, and the first Black woman to be elected to the senate. A few years later we saw the first Black secretary of state and first Black president. Then we skip to the next generation of the 2020s and we see that only “black lives matter,” since saying “all lives matter” is racist. We are now told that defunding the police in cities is a way to stop racism, and we watch NFL players wear a list of names of “victims of systemic racism” on players’ helmets while refusing to stand for America’s national anthem.

• The only pronouns kids were concerned with a generation ago were the grammatically correct ones taught in English class, such as “her” refers to a girl” and “he” refers to a boy, and the term “gender” was solely for classifying nouns. Today, schools and society teach kids to replace the identifier term “sex” with the more muddled term “gender” and to believe that doctors merely guess the gender when babies are born since a few years later it is up to the child to decide what he/she really is.

• Following a rise in deaths related to the disease, tuberculosis was declared a global emergency by the World Health Organization in 1993. However, no one was mandated to wear a mask, forced to get a shot, made to close their business or school, or commanded to remain 6-feet from another human. Furthermore, the churches and schools never locked their doors in quaking fear in the 1990s due to a serious contagious illness like they did in the 2020s. 

• President Clinton’s ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy regarding homosexuals serving in the American military was announced in 1993. That was night and day different from President Biden’s military policies of today which openly celebrate having so-called transgendered troops and pay for transgender surgeries and abortion traveling expenses for military personnel.

• Mrs. Doubtfire was 1993’s top grossing movie. At a time when the word “transgender” had yet to be concocted, the movie, which starred Robin Williams as a man who dresses as a woman as a ruse, made fun of cross-dressing and was seen as hilarious slapstick. Jump ahead a generation and now the freshly invented term “transgender” is being taught to public school kindergarteners as a serious, scientific reality that they might want to consider adopting. Today Mrs. Doubtfire is considered a so-called “transphobic” film since it doesn’t represent the admirable situation of a man dressing like a woman because he is proud to “live his truth.”

• The 1990s brought us the first cell phone that could text and soon thereafter the first cell phone that could browse the internet. Now in 2023 we have mom handing her cell phone to her toddler as his primary soothing device and dad buying cell phones for his two middle school kids as her primary cyberbullying device and his primary porn-finding device. 

Finally, let’s explain why faithful, authentic Catholics yearn for a way to turn back the clock to better times by reflecting on how different it was in the Catholic Church 30 years ago.

In 1993, Pope John Paul II published his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of the Truth) which expressed the fundamentals of the Catholic Church’s role in moral teaching, such as asserting that there are indeed absolute truths, and that we cannot permit a sinful man to be deceived by those who claim to love him by justifying his sin. The Pope quotes Saint Paul that “…sexual perverts…are excluded from the Kingdom of God” and reminds us that homosexuality is a mortal sin and an intrinsically evil act.

Fast forward thirty years and we now see Pope Francis writing encyclicals and telling the press that the Church’s mission is to combat global warming, that the Church is wrong on allowing the death penalty and wrong on the indissolubility of marriage, that the Church should consider the idea of blessing same-sex partners and ordaining women deacons, and that “if a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” Moreover, our 2023 Pope on the one hand encouraged non-Catholics and atheists to participate in the synod’s listening sessions and allowed women to vote in what has always been a bishops-only synod, but on the other hand scornfully treated traditional, orthodox Catholics and deeply reduced the number of Latin Mass parishes.

It certainly can be depressing to recall how healthier and happier our culture appeared to be a generation ago and to glumly accept the reality that the most we can go back in time this Sunday is 60 minutes. But let’s consider what else we can go back to… 

• We can go back to Mass if we haven’t been going weekly;

• We can go back to Confession so to make ourselves right with God for the times we messed up and separated our ourselves from Him;

• We can go back to maintaining our trust in our Lord, remembering all the ways He has supported us throughout our lives up until this point. Our Almighty Fathers’ love does not change even when our circumstances do.

As a Christian, I should believe that today is for me and tomorrow is for God, so I ought not to be afraid of the future. But I am human and find myself at times negatively wondering what will happen in the world, my country, my Church, and my family? Unfortunately, at various times in the 2020s I have found myself grow weary by spending too much time worrying what calamity will I face tomorrow. Will my personal life and society in general get worse? Will there be an approaching time when I have nothing to hope in anymore?

These last few years have brought many unforeseen spiritual, emotional, and physical challenges to my loved ones and me. One example is how the Archdiocese for which I had taught in and administered in their Catholic schools for 40 years fired me for not getting jabbed with an abortion-connected, unproven vaccine. Fortunately by God’s grace, I received just enough clarity to see Him working within my chaos. I found myself losing my career and my lifelong home-state due to the ignorant and/or bad-hearted decisions of an Archbishop and Pastor, but had this not happened I never would have found solace in a move to a non-oppressive, conservative state where I can enjoy the serene life of early retirement and write a blog for like-minded Catholics nationwide.

The lesson I’ve learned is that I can pray for God to act around me, but I should also be prepared for God to act within me. Sometimes when circumstances do not change, we instead find ourselves changing. Consequently, we grow in the face of adversity and begin to see suffering from a more Christlike perspective.

Regardless of the negative events that impact my life or the steep slope to decay that our society is heading with ever-increasing speed, I have been able to better improve my stress by remembering to rest from the worrisome thoughts, knowing that my Heavenly Father will handle tomorrow. Thus, I can rest peacefully today.

…but before today ends, I have to go turn back my clocks one hour.