Living The Worthy Life: Let America Be America Again

In 1935 the American poet, Langston Hughes, wrote the poem,  Let America Be America Again. The poem was about his life and his feelings but the poem is also about our time and our feelings.  Nowhere is this more clear than in the first stanza of this poem.

Let America be America again.

Let it be the dream it used to be.

Let it be the pioneer on the plain

Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be America again.  This should be the battle cry for all people living in this time in the United States.  We are living in a time where everything is changing and we are living in a time where traditional values are discarded like yesterdays´ trash.  They are dumped on the waste heap of humanity and thrown back into the face of people who believed in them like it was the wrong thing to do.  

O, let my land be a land where Liberty

Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,

But opportunity is real, and life is free,

Equality is in the air we breathe.

Liberty- huh that is funny.  What talk of liberty,  Now the only liberty is to believe as you are told to choose what you are told to choose from -in effect your only choice is their choice and your only bidding is their bidding. 

in an opinion piece for the New York Times, Jan. 23, 2021, stated that The new president elevates a liberal Catholicism that once seemed destined to fade away.   Joe Biden was inaugurated 60 years to the day of the first Catholic President- John F. Kennedy.  President Kennedy may have been many things in fact he may have enjoyed life too much, but inspired confidence in a nation that trusted in him.  To paraphrase the 1988 Lloyd Bentsen quote, "Mr. President,  I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Mr. President, you are no Jack Kennedy."

You can not do this in America?  This is what Langston Hughes had to say:

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?

Surely not me? The millions on relief today?

The millions shot down when we strike?

The millions who have nothing for our pay?

For all the dreams we’ve dreamed

And all the songs we’ve sung

And all the hopes we’ve held

And all the flags we’ve hung,

The millions who have nothing for our pay—

Except for the dream that’s almost dead today.

Ross Douthat continued in his New York Times, Jan. 23, 2021 Opinion piece by explaining: 

Liberal Catholicism is not traditional Catholicism and should be recognized as such right here and right now! Calling a form of religion “liberal” can mean two different things: On the one hand, theological liberalism, which seeks an evolution in doctrine to adapt to modern needs; on the other, support for policies and parties of the center-left. In practice, though, the two tend to be conjoined: The American Catholic Church as an institution is caught between the two political coalitions, but most prominent Catholic Democrats are liberals in theology and politics alike. But more than a set of ideas, liberal Catholicism is a culture, recognizable in its institutions and tropes, its iconography and allusions — to Pope John XXIII and Jesuit universities, to the “seamless garment” of Catholic teaching and the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council, to the works of Thomas Merton and hymns like “On Eagle’s Wings” (which Biden quoted in his victory speech). And, of course, invocations of Pope Francis. A decade ago it was commonplace to regard liberal Catholicism as a tradition in decline. Its period of maximal influence, the late 1960s, and 1970s had been an era of institutional crisis for the church, which gave way to the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Conservative Catholics felt that liberal ideas had been tried and failed, liberal Catholics felt that they had been suppressed.

Liberal Catholics look at the Church and want to change it.  When you think about this, is it not odd that a Church that was established by Jesus Christ through his appointed Apostles should be changed by liberal Catholics who think their ideas have been suppressed?  Are they not admitting here to being heretical? Does not the Church have the ability to tell its members what their teachings are and should be or should the members tell the Church?