At 2:00am the first Sunday of every November, Daylight Saving Time ends, and so we turn back our clocks one hour. But that is not enough! I plead for the ability to turn back time much more than 60 minutes!
We have been experiencing in this 21st Century the rapid decline of society. Every time and everywhere we look we see nations at war, government officials who are corrupt, a two-faced and disordered justice system, and depraved sexual morals. As Catholics, we also see a Church that contains some lukewarm (at best) and heretical (at worst) clergy and laity. Is there any way we can turn our clocks back the first Sunday in November not just one hour, but one whole 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 entire generation when Daylight Savings Time ends, we would find ourselves in November in the 1990s. Let’s reflect on how less evil, perverted, and idiotic society was a generation ago…
- The only abbreviations students learned in school 30 years ago were “the ABCs” and “USA.” Schools these days set aside academics so they can indoctrinate students with secularism and liberalism represented by ever-growing sets of initials. In recent years, propagandizing teachers and most schools have been teaching kids about “DEI,” “BLM,” “BIPOC,” “SEL,” and the number one, perverse and nonsense term – “LGBTQIA2S+.”
- In 1993, we saw the first black woman to fly in space, the first black woman to earn the Nobel Prize in literature, and the first black woman to be elected to the U.S. Senate. A few years after that, still in the 20th Century, we saw the first Black secretary of state and first Black president. But when we skip ahead a generation, we see that only “black lives matter.” Insisting that “all lives matter” is racist. Nowadays, we are preached to that defunding the police in cities is a way to stop racism. We see sports stars refuse to stand for America’s national anthem because we supposedly live in a racist country.
- The only pronouns kids were concerned with a generation ago were the grammatically correct ones taught in English class. Examples included using “her” when referring to a girl” and “he” when referring to a boy. Plus, the term “gender” was solely a term used for classifying nouns. This generation’s schools misuse pronouns depending on how a person feels about himself or herself. The culture teaches kids to replace the identifier term “sex” with the more muddled term “gender.” We are made to believe that doctors merely guess the gender/sex when babies are born, and then a few years later it is up to the child to decide what he or 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 in that older generation 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 with covid 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 the recent military policies of President Biden which openly celebrated having so-called transgendered troops, paid for transgender surgeries, and paid for the traveling expenses for military personnel who chose to have abortions.
- 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 taught in some public elementary schools as a serious, scientific reality that kids might want to consider adopting. Mrs. Doubtfire is now 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. Soon thereafter we got the first cell phone that could browse the internet. Now a generation later, we have mom handing her cell phone to her toddler to serve as a primary soothing device. We also have dad buying cell phones for his two middle school kids to serve as his daughter’s primary cyberbullying device and his son’s primary porn-finding device.
As for why faithful, authentic Catholics yearn for a way to turn back the clock to better times, let’s reflect on how different it was in the Catholic Church 30-some years ago.
In 1993, Pope John Paul II published his encyclical Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of the Truth). It 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 quoted Saint Paul that “…sexual perverts…are excluded from the Kingdom of God” and reminded us that homosexuality is a mortal sin and an intrinsically evil act.
Fast forward thirty years and we had Pope Francis recently writing encyclicals and telling the press that the Church’s mission is to combat global warming and that the Church was wrong on both allowing the death penalty and regarding the indissolubility of marriage. Our 21st Century pope also stressed that the Church consider the idea of blessing same-sex partners and ordaining women deacons. Plus, he said that “if a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge?” Moreover, in 2023 Francis encouraged non-Catholics and atheists to participate in a so-called synodal listening session. While at the same time, he 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 the first Sunday in November is a mere 60 minutes.
However, let’s not feel too melancholy. Although the reality is we cannot go back in time a generation, we certainly can go back in some ways to some things.
- We can go back to attending weekly Mass if we haven’t been going regularly, so to worship God and receive the Eucharist;
- We can go back to Confession if it has been a while since we last went, so to make ourselves right with God for the times we messed up and separated ourselves from Him;
- We can go back to daily prayer if we have stopped this practice, which might include saying Grace as a family every night at dinner or perhaps praying the Rosary.
As Christians, we should believe that today is for us and tomorrow is for God, so we ought not to be afraid of the future. But being human, most of us find ourselves negatively wondering what will happen in the world, our country, our Church, and our families.
At various times in these first decades of the 21st Century, many of us have found ourselves growing weary because we spend too much time worrying what calamity will hit us tomorrow. We wonder if society in general will continue to get worse, not just for us but for our kids and grandkids. We fear there could be an approaching time when we have nothing to hope in anymore.
Personally speaking, this era we are currently living brought about some trying times. One big example is how just a few years ago the Seattle Archdiocese fired me for not getting jabbed with an unjustly mandated, abortion-connected, unproven vaccine. I served the Archdiocese faithfully for 40 years as a Catholic school teacher and principal, but suddenly found myself losing my career due to the ignorant and/or bad-hearted decisions of the Church’s clerical and lay leadership.
Fortunately by God’s grace, I eventually received clarity to see Him working within my chaos. Had I not suffered that blow, I never would have found solace in a move to a less oppressive, more conservative state. I now enjoy the serene life of early retirement, living with more like-minded, Christ-centered Tennesseans than I even had living among Washingtonians. Plus, that event that I thought was a negative also proved to be a positive by making me start my “second career” as a writer both on this blog site and for the national site, CatholicStand.com.
The lesson I learned from my 2020-2022 misfortune was 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 our lives or the steep slope to decay that our society is heading with ever-increasing speed, we can lessen our stress and anxiety. We do this by remembering to rest peacefully today from any worrisome thoughts, knowing that our Heavenly Father will handle tomorrow.
…but before today ends, we may have to turn back our clocks one hour.
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