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Will this Fourth of July be our last as a relatively free nation?

As we prepare to celebrate our country’s 244th birthday, its survival as a bastion of liberty hangs in the balance.

Racial tensions have once again boiled over, while Americans are seemingly irreconcilably divided politically as they were in 1860 — with the prospect of a bloody repetition of history on the horizon. Not a civil war between the North and South, but a conflict between urban vs. rural, and progressives vs. traditionalists.

Sometimes, the yesteryear words regarding America’s destiny from those abroad may be more on-point than the endless blather from talking heads on television. I call your attention to a prediction about America’s future given by a British historian and essayist in the mid-19th century.

Thomas Babington Macaulay was chillingly prophetic when he wrote to an American friend in 1857:

“Your republic will be fearfully plundered by the barbarians in the twentieth century as the Roman Empire was in the fifth, with the difference that the Huns and Vandals will have been engendered by your own institutions.”

Macaulay was off by a few years, but his scenario about homegrown havoc was spot on. The barbarians on the march in America’s cities seek to burn down and pull down everything they consider offensive — and what many Americans treasure. Not only the statues and historic landmarks, but also faith, liberty, limited government, the rule of law, civil discourse and respect for life.

The dark forces of destruction are not oppressed and deprived proletarians, but rather, well-fed know-it-alls steeped in godless philosophy in government K-12 schools and universities. Their entertainment comes from Hollyweird, whose actors and producers are largely out of touch with Americans in the heartland. And their news often comes from those who seek to shape opinion rather than recount objectively the news of the day.

These anti-American Huns and Vandals could create enough chaos to plunge the nation into an abyss from which it may not escape.

There was another prophecy delivered by an American prophet. Not long before his death in 1852, Daniel Webster, a U.S. senator and secretary of state, sounded a warning for his countrymen then and now:

“If we and our posterity reject religious instruction and authority, violate the rules of eternal justice, trifle with the injunctions of morality, and recklessly destroy the political constitution which holds us together, no man can tell how sudden a catastrophe may overwhelm us and bury all our glory in profound obscurity.”

The pandemic has taught us how suddenly our world can change and liberty diminish. We live in a country much different from what it was even six months ago. Our homegrown Huns and Vandals show how we can destroy ourselves.

— al@beacononlinenews.com