World View and Kyle Rittenhouse
In our world today, information rushes to and fro, fulfilling the prophecy of Daniel 12: 4, but what’s REALLY happening? Nicholas Carr, in his book, The Shallows, says it simply, “Whether I’m online or not, my mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in swiftly moving streams of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in a sea of glorious words, but now I zip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.” Carr summarized that in “swiflty moving streams of particles,” we are losing our ability to sustain rational thought. We are losing our minds.
Let’s reason a little on this. As a 20-year retired Army veteran, who commanded soldiers in multiple combat tours, and just a few years from my Microsoft 15-year crystal, I believe the 2021 Kyle Rittenhouse trial was not about a 17-year-old very nice young man who shot three white men, two of whom were federally convicted criminals. At least one ‘victim’ was previously convicted of child sexual assault and another of domestic violence. The truth is that Woke, leftist agenda voices, far more closely associated with Marxist collectivism, tried to falsely use race to put on trial our right to self-defense. Dwight Eisenhower, touring Buchenwald Concentration Camp, looked at a pile of dead concentration camp bodies and said, “This is the end destination for all disarmed people.”
As I see so many leaning hard into Woke, left leaning agendas, I get it that my country is moving far from my worldview. Yet, it strikes me that such statements and positions, pushed into our national life, are sucking life out of the imagination and innovation that made our nation great. As our national leadership leans left and gets all Woke about equity and justice reform, rather than focusing on the liberty of empowering every citizen, we are losing our ability to reason in the exponentially growing “swiftly moving streams of particles.” As a result, I see my national leaders pumping out Woke statements of supposed sorrow that exploit the media narrative, widening the gap between worldviews of people like me and the nation I spent most of my professional life defending.
After leading troopers in combat, building data centers and fiber backbones in Iraq, and serving as the CTO and Chief Engineer in the J6 at NORAD-USNORTHCOM, professionalism to me is simple: Love your neighbor as yourself. The Lord blessed me with an amazing but tough year in southwest Asia, protection from rockets and mortars every 3 to 5 days, and most importantly, I did not lose a single trooper. I had a few wounded by shrapnel. A quarter inch under the surface of the skin, no matter the skin color, race, ethnicity, man or woman, we all bleed red and would die for each other. Life is so precious, a gift from our Creator. I held their hands in the Balad hospital, prayed with them, and thankfully, did not lose a single one.
I do not know if that resonates with you, dear reader, but Reason and Logic, framed by faith, 20 years in the Army, commanding troops in combat, and studying History across my professional life, tells me that we should Prepare for Danger as opposed to distracting our brilliant citizens away from the God-given gifts of imagination and innovation that made us great. Carr concluded in his book, The Shallows, that “Calm, focused, and undistracted, the rational mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts – the faster the better.” Media fed events like Kenosha distracts our nation away from the truly strategic and worrisome movements of nations half a world away (i.e., China perhaps attacking Taiwan and that impact on the Semiconductor industry). I’m convinced and worried that across multiple Woke distractions, even in our great nation, our society’s attitude toward intellectual achievement is shifting away from being cultivators of knowledge and innovation to being hunters and gatherers in the high velocity electronic data forest. As we lose our reason, in our Woke surge that is distracting our brilliant citizens away from truth, situations like this are sucking our brains dry while destroying life and liberty. Some might say we are losing our humanity.
Yet… Like we read in Ecclesiastes, “There is nothing new under the sun.” I have a very simple definition of culture. From eternity past to day 7 in Genesis 1, God created. From day 8 on, man began filling the earth and establishing dominion. We were given the mission of using the imagination and innovation God created in us, infused by His revelation, to formulate and build beauty. The tempter, deceiver, and usurper of creation perverts that mission but his end is coming in the great Super Bowl at the end when Jesus wins.