Things I’m Waiting For

by Thomas E. Woods, Jr.

There are four of them.

1) I’m waiting for a prominent black leader to have the courage and integrity to say something like the following:

"My people, it is time to face facts. Whatever the injustices and humiliations we have suffered in the past, and they are not few, there can be no excuse for not getting our house in order today. When a group of hooligans initiates a riot at a school stadium, no people with any dignity or pride rushes immediately to their defense. A dignified people demands nothing short of virtue and excellence.

"I would be the last person to argue that we are living through anything less than one of the most depraved and debased cultural periods in history. At the same time, the culture being peddled to our black youth is the worst and most depraved of all. Why has not a single one of us stood up to ‘musicians’ – whose ‘art’ encourages promiscuity, rape, and even murder, and tells our young men that it is all right to treat our women like disposable objects – and told them that they are a disgrace to the memory of those of our ancestors, like the now-reviled Booker T. Washington, who demanded of us that we educate and elevate ourselves to a level at which white America would have to stand up and take notice? Is that what our youth culture is doing for the next generation?

"Look around our inner-city schools. Money is not the problem, my friends. Books and desks do not cost much. But walk down the corridor of such a school one day and observe the students’ conduct. Would a dignified people allow their youth to degenerate to this level, and lamely pretend that only ‘racism’ can account for their poor performance? An idealistic friend of Korean extraction decided a couple years ago that she would teach in a Harlem junior high. She did so for two years. What she saw can scarcely be expressed in words, and the racial epithets and sexually charged language she endured would have made Andrew Dice Clay blush.

"She no longer lives in New York.

"We especially must remember St. Peter’s counsel in his first epistle. He was speaking to Christians against whom persecution could break out at any time, but his message applies to us in a special way. Christians, he said, must be sure to be good so that if they should ever be persecuted or treated unjustly, everyone would know that their faith had been their only crime.

"Let us, then, roll up our sleeves and get to work. To hell with the racial hustling of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Let’s accomplish something genuine for a change."

2) I’m waiting for the following from a Catholic bishop:

"My dear Catholic laity, I must remind you that in matters of judgment and prudence the body of the episcopate, in union with the Pope, is not infallible. We proved that with what can charitably be described as the serious lapse in judgment we showed with the bewildering series of changes we instituted in the wake of Vatican II, most notably with the revised rite of Mass.

"My brethren in the episcopate have tried desperately to explain away the catastrophic decline in priestly vocations that has occurred in the wake of that Council, but there is no escaping the connection between this unhappy situation and the new rite of Mass. In the bad old days, the priest was a figure of awe, who alone could approach the tabernacle, who alone could dispense the Bread of Life to the trembling communicants at the altar rail, and who cared nothing for popularity or the applause of the world. He offered a beautiful and majestic rite of Mass that even non-Catholics found stunning and sublime. Can it be any wonder, then, that little boys are less attracted by the modern priest figure, whom the leftists have done their best to render effeminate and comtemptible, and whose rite of Mass has been so criminally vandalized and shorn of the mystery and awe that once converted a world?

"We are living in a world that becomes more aggressively vulgar and debased every single day. Now is not the time, if there ever was one, to suppress, or to allow only in very rare instances, the immemorial Mass that was such a bulwark of the Faith and a sure font of grace for so many centuries. This is war, my friends, and the traditional Missal is our greatest weapon. To a world that believes that nothing is immune to change, that the family itself is subject to redefinition according to human whim, let us respond with the piety and reverence of the traditional Latin Mass, which in its beauty and stately reserve, and in its reservation of sacred tasks to the priest alone, reminds us that some things really are not to be touched by man. What message does our world need more than this?

"Return, then, my priests, to the traditional rite of Mass, never suppressed by the Church and still a living reality in the lives of millions around the world. In this effort you will enjoy my every assistance."

3) I’m also waiting for someone to point out that nearly all the positions, usually moral ones, for which Pat Buchanan is accused of "extremism" are in fact opinions that until 1960 were held by virtually everyone in every country in the world, in every major religious tradition in the world and in every civilization that has ever existed.

In political matters, moreover, such as Pat’s aversion to foreign entanglements (which could be purer, no doubt) and his insistence on localism (manifested, for instance, in his call for the abolition of the Department of Education), the man is only echoing the unanimous sentiment of the founders of this country, who believed in peace and non-intervention, and who were also quaint enough to insist that, in education as in everything else, people at the local level were capable of governing themselves without George III – er, Bill Clinton – telling them what to do.

Gee, how "extreme."

4) Finally, I’m waiting for a major political candidate to turn the tables on those who criticize the religious Right. (If anything, of course, the main problem with the religious Right is that their leaders are far too timid.) The positions they hold are overwhelmingly those of a desperate people fighting a rearguard action. They are not those of people eager to commit what in our Ricki Lake culture is the unforgivable sin of "imposing their views on other people." Thus, for example, they want schools that they, and not some unconstitutional federal bureaucracy, can control. They do not want their schools dominated by leftists who, quite unlike the religious Right itself, have no scruples about imposing their own moral views on the entire population. As has been pointed out before, Christians don’t make a habit of harassing people in Greenwich Village, but homosexual activists, apparently incapable of simple reciprocation, have thrown condoms during Mass in St. Patrick’s Cathedral. It is the folks who identify themselves with the religious Right who simply want to be left alone. For those of us who cling to the idea that we still live in a free country, that doesn’t seem like an unreasonable or mean-spirited demand.

So those are the four things I’m waiting for. And guess what.

I’m still waiting.

October 10, 2000

Thomas E. Woods, Jr., a professor of history at Suffolk Community College on Long Island, holds a PhD in history from Columbia University and is a contributing editor of The Latin Mass magazine.