My 9-year-old daughter loves gymnastics; we were looking forward to watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics together. Then I saw the videos of the drag queens front and center of the entertainment and their blasphemous reenactment of the Last Supper. As a father, it saddens me that I can’t let my children watch the Olympics opening ceremony.
As a citizen, it made me realize what Vice President and Border Czar Kamala Harris means when she repeats the words, “What can be, unburdened by what has been.” We are already seeing this idea in society, and she is outwardly campaigning to ramp it up. What can be? Drag queen story hour. Unburdened by what has been? Family values. You may have missed what else has been going on.
The first thing that we saw this past week is the left-wing media change articles from 3 and 5 years ago. Here are some examples:
What can be: Kamala is a center left.
Unburdened by what has been: GovTrack labeled Kamala as “most liberal senator” in 2019.
What can be: Kamala was never in charge of the border.
Unburdened by what has been: Axios lede, “President Biden is putting Vice President Harris in charge of addressing the migrant surge at the U.S.-Mexico border” (March 24, 2021).
Last week GovTrack quietly removed that distinction after “reevaluating” the data, and Axios updated two articles removing the term “Border Czar” and saying that Biden did not put her in charge of the border. George Orwell predicted this in his book 1984, “‘Who controls the past,’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”
Then I started thinking about the changes we have seen in our public school. When I was growing up, the schools were trying to teach reading, writing and arithmetic. Students were in general healthy and happy. Now it is DEI, gender fluidity, and climate change. Our students are now in general sick and depressed. What can be, unburden by what has been.
America needs to decide if it still holds its traditional values, such merit, excellence, and intelligence. It needs to decide whether it still sees itself as a society where anyone can succeed, which drew people like my grandparents and my wife’s grandparents, who legally immigrated here during or in the aftermath of World War 2. They didn’t speak the language or have more than a couple pennies to run together, but they were able to be successful because of their grit.
We’ve seen this with the radical changes to Title IX too, which were just approved in the largest school district in our state, Wake County. It was designed to give women equal opportunities. Now they are using it to force institutions that take federal funding to allow men to have equal access to women’s bathrooms and dorms and to let men compete against women in sports. What can be, unburdened by what has been.
North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper is a leading candidate to be Harris’ runningmate, and future vice president if successful. He vetoed the following bills:
House Bill 574: Fairness in Women’s Sports Act.
Senate Bill 49: Parents’ Bill of Rights.
House Bill 808: Gender Transition/Minors.
These are bills that most North Carolinians, of all political parties, agree with and are consistent with our historical shared values — “what has been.”
The Harris presidential campaign site currently has no policy positions to read up on — not inflation, not illegal immigration, not crime. Nothing. Why be burdened by those (especially since she helped exacerbate those problems)? Like France, she wants to recreate herself anew, forgetting the inconvenient past in favor of the radical future.
Robert Bortins is CEO of Classical Conversations, a Christ-centered homeschool program in the classical tradition.
