These are solidly liberal Manhattanites, mind you. They just don’t want their children being told they carry the unwashable stain of racial sin. And they’d really rather have their kids master real knowledge, instead of being taught to meditate endlessly on their own race, gender and sexuality.
As the only “out” conservative they know, I’m often the only person these parents can pour out their anguish to. And I’m wearying of the job.
I worry just as much about the rise of the woke. Yet I’ve come to view the ambient liberalism these New Yorkers take for granted as a big part of the problem. It doesn’t suffice to overcome wokeness, because it forms people to be selfish and self-maximizing, to avoid deep commitments of any kind.
Put another way, there’s a reason these parents confine their gripes to the one conservative they know. At the end of the day, they’re prepared to tolerate woke rule if it means passing on their elite status to their progeny.
If the history of 20th-century totalitarianism should’ve taught us anything, it’s that radicals can usually get the better of such people, by playing on their yearning to “get ahead” in life. Whereas the true dissidents and resisters — those who refuse to profess that two plus two equals five — draw strength from faith, tradition and true authority.
It’s a lesson I’ve inscribed, quite literally, in my own son’s identity, by naming him after Saint Maximilian Kolbe — among the greatest of Christian martyrs.
Born to a pious family in central Poland in 1894, Kolbe joined the Franciscans at age 16. Following doctoral studies in Rome and ordination as a priest, Kolbe returned to his homeland, where he started a newspaper, a radio station and a monastic community outside Warsaw. He campaigned against Communism and secularism and went on far-flung missions to the Far East.
