Just under a year ago, I broke up with my long-distance girlfriend, or more accurately, she broke up with me. “Mindy” (not her real name) is a top LA tax attorney (divorced), me a Miami-based writer. Our reunion in Washington for the 2022 American Spectator Gala did not go as we hoped. And I have an inflexible rule about women for which I’m often criticized. Which is you can’t be friends with those whom you’re attracted to, even when they wish to be. Because it’s not real friendship, only a lopsided mockery of one. Consequently, my communication with Mindy went from nightly phone conversations with sweet endearments to texts of “Happy Birthday” or “Merry Christmas”.
But even at our most amorous point, I always knew the most important male in Mindy’s life was not me. It was her college-age son, and only child, “Philip” (not his real name). I never had a problem with this in the four years of our bi-coastal romance. I’d even proffered advice on books Philip should read, movies he should watch, even the university he should attend. I recommended two academic bastions against Marxist indoctrination — Hillsdale College and Thomas Aquinas College. (READ MORE: College Past Its Decline)
Three years ago, Philip decided on the University of California at Irvine. His mother shared with me her pride at having him leave the nest and begin his journey to manhood. But that was autumn 2020, amid the COVID panic. The college shut down and Philip went back home for “virtual learning.” Things went downhill from there.
Mindy would tell me, in sparse detail, about Philip’s depression. How much he hated the school and system. How his mental problems spilled into the physical. How she made sure the guns in the house remained out of his reach. Then came our ill-fated reunion in DC, followed by the breakdown in communication, and not another word about Philip — until one Sunday night last June.
I turned on a British detective series we both enjoyed on PBS’s Masterpiece and heard host Alan Cumming announce its final season. Bending my strict rule, I texted Mindy, “Endeavor — final season.” Her text came back, “My son died last week. He took a stress pill that had something bad on it. Pray for us.”
Progressivism has poisoned the young, mind and body, converting them to useful idiots, zombies, or corpses.
I mourned. A young man — the heart of a girl I love — vanished from this Earth. All her plans, her dreams for him — which I’d shared in — had come to an end. Of course, I called her. Of course, I offered to help in any way I could. Of course, I pledged eternal friendship, my rule be damned in her case. Of course, I sent her pertinent reflections from great works of literature I’d read, including my favorite book of all time, The Three Musketeers (“She was an angel on Earth before becoming one in Heaven.”) And of course, I pray for her and the soul of her son.
I’ve had little contact with Mindy since. But I keep dwelling on Phil, and what could have brought about his depression and death. Disjointed as my thoughts are, they all lead to one place — the systematic abuse of our youth by the left. Progressivism has poisoned the young, mind and body, converting them to useful idiots, zombies, or corpses. As its power has risen over education, government, and the culture, its victims have increased to a point never imaginable.
“A stress pill,” Mindy wrote. When I was Philip’s age, the only concept of a stress pill I knew was from the classic film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. It seemed as science-fictional as the movie. Yet Philip took such a pill, laced with something fatal, probably brought in through the Biden-opened southern border. I can’t address the boy’s personal problems — only the poli-cultural factors creating many more young victims like him, multiplied by the COVID tyranny.
The pandemic invigorated and empowered the liberal vampires like human blood. Even at its height, everyone knew healthy youth and children had nothing to fear from the virus. Yet progressives locked them out of their schools and playgrounds, forced them to wear worthless masks, and compelled their ingestion of an undertested vaccine — except in Florida, where Governor DeSantis put an early stop to the madness, and got pathetically lambasted by the left. (READ MORE: Ron DeSantis: Next Victim of the Democrats’ Digital Reign of Terror)
It was America’s darkest hour in my lifetime, that sent millions of youths into a depression from which they have not yet recovered. Today, a wave of children’s mental health issues is overwhelming emergency rooms across the country, according to a paper released Wednesday by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), and Emergency Nurses Association (ENA). The crisis has only encouraged leftists to further abuse our kids.
Rutgers University is mandating students get vaccinated for COVID this semester or be disenrolled. “From what should be the voice of reason comes arbitrary garbage,” stated Republican New Jersey state Senator Declan O’Scanlon. Humorist Scott Adams was more vicious in his Sunday podcast (starts 1:02:44). “Imagine being accepted to college, and you’re all set to go … and they tell you you have to get vaccinated — in 2023 … It’s just jaw-droppingly amazing that Rutgers can still stay in business. I don’t think that there would be anything better for the country than all of our colleges going out of business.”
And what do students who actually do go to college learn? That America is a racist, heteronormative hellscape. That sex is interchangeable. That straight white men like Philip are the Devil — who also doesn’t exist. And nothing in the mainstream culture, or the crap that passes for entertainment, contradicts this — in fact, it reinforces it.
The right must do more than blast the left. It must give young people something wonderful to believe in — beginning with God. At least Philip is with Him now.
READ MORE from Lou Aguilar:
Culture Matters: Righting the American Ship
