OPINION:
Imagine if we heard this address from a future president:
Mr. Speaker, Members of Congress, and my fellow Americans, Article II: Section 3 of our Constitution states that the President should “from time to time give to the Congress information of the State of the Union and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”
A spoken address is not required, and sadly, when given pro se, it seems little more than a presidential rodomontade. So, now is not the time for bragging or self-adulation. On this occasion, I must speak honestly about the state of our union. We are fractured, bitterly divided, and approaching a dysfunction that threatens our national survival. My fellow Americans, the state of our union is in peril. It is time to speak clearly and truthfully.
We have become a nation that has rejected the rule of law in favor of the rule of ideology. We no longer concern ourselves with the rights of victims, preferring to favor the rights of the victimizers who are assaulting our families, neighborhoods, communities — indeed, our nation. The very day they commit their crimes and are arrested, we release scofflaws onto our streets to continue to torment us.
We parole convicted criminals who reoffend even before they have served their justified sentences or paid full restitution for their grievous acts. We are besieged with a drug epidemic that is enabled by our complete failure to secure our borders. We have rejected the law and embraced lawlessness in the false hope that it will sustain freedom.
It is doing the opposite. America, our union is under assault.
We are engaging in profligate spending at the federal level that threatens to destroy our free enterprise system. Once, we were concerned when national debt was 75% of our gross national product. Today our debt exceeds 128% of everything we produce. Yet legislators call for more spending, as if such rank irresponsibility were sound fiscal policy. This lunacy must be rejected now. America, we are addicted to spending and debt, and that undermines the state of our union.
We have rejected the wisdom of our founders, and the virtue they knew was vital in sustaining our freedom. We now prefer to view these great men as racists and evildoers whose words, accomplishments, pictures and statues must be abolished or torn down based on a false interpretation of history that amounts to profoundly anti-American ideology.
Moreover, the most radical among us now claim that our identity is manifestly racial in nature and not “one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The false prophets of our time would have us reject E pluribus unum for divide et impera. Yet they disregard the warnings of our founders that to abandon “out of many one” for “divide and conquer” would fulfill the desire of our enemies. Too many in our society embrace the disunity of racial division and class warfare while subscribing to historical obscurantism to fracture our society. The union is being torn asunder while we watch passively.
Most alarming is the state of family unity in America, one that has been gravely damaged by divorce, out-of-wedlock births, sexual abuse, violence, drug addiction, gang warfare, and an education system that is failing future generations. We seem to have forgotten as a nation that families are the fundamental civilizing feature of society. We benefit when a man and a woman are faithfully committed to each other.
Indeed, strong families are able to raise children in love and equip them to be virtuous citizens in their neighborhood, state and nation. But we have allowed and encouraged anti-religious sentiments to undermine the Judeo-Christian institution of the family. Now we are told that the institution of marriage is passe. That the gender of our birth is irrelevant. And that children should be subjected to gender-altering procedures before they are old enough to understand the long-term consequences. America, the fractured state of our families undermines the state of our union, and we must speak up now and end the desecration of this foundational institution.
Many will say that these remarks are divisive. No. They simply and plainly reveal the divisiveness that is destroying our nation. In the Bible, we read how Ezra and Nehemiah revived the Children of Abraham in rebuilding their society from years of subjugation and desolation. Like them, we can also rebuild the foundations of our nation, not with secular legislation but through a spiritual revival. Let us resolve to seek out the Nehemiahs of our age to rebuild the state of our union and unleash a new beginning to a greater nation. If not us, who? If not now, when? Good night, and God bless America.
Alas, the silence is deafening.
• L. Scott Lingamfelter, a retired Army colonel, served in the Virginia General Assembly from 2002 to 2018. He is the author of “Desert Redleg: Artillery Warfare in the First Gulf War” (University Press of Kentucky, 2020) and “Yanks in Blue Berets: American UN Peacekeepers in the Middle East” (UPK, 4 July 2023).
