It is probably pretty sad, but the best conservative bumper sticker I've ever seen reads "Losing Slowly :)."
And while I smile and laugh and agree completely, I find it hard to, as a fellow conservative once advised, "stay merry" while the world around me goes to hell in a hand-basket. The sticker perfectly sums up the fact that to be of a conservative persuasion is to be fighting an eternal losing battle. And that can be pretty depressing, let me tell ya.
Especially in today's world. Everywhere I look I see the things I once took for granted being hammered at from the base or completely demolished in the face of the "general will" (see mob mentality) while good men and women watch on or walk past, oblivious. I see groups that once stood for what was good and true do an about-face and show the world their lack of spine or conviction. I see craven cowardice and unabashed greed. Appalling arrogance leads people to believe that they can achieve anything-only to show, in the end, how feeble and petty men really are when they fall. I see how men, seemingly benign, are actually selling their fellow man either down the river to oblivion or to a form of subservience little better (if at all) than enslavement, the only difference being servitude to the all-encompassing "State" apparatus as opposed to an individual, leading, instead of exploitation of labor a hollowing nihilism that kills the soul, leaving nothing but a husk of a man or woman incapable of independent thought or, for that matter, independence at all.
Our country's children are receiving the worst that human depravity has to show, our schools inundated with violence, drugs, sex, and amorality, with any attempt to rectify it being demonized on high. And it's only getting worse.
In the case of higher education, the situation is as bad as its ever been. If anyone ever bothered to see what passes for education in some of our educational institutions, they would return to reality with a piece of their humanity missing, whatever innocence was left gone forever, stolen by our "popular" culture and culture of death. The monstrous Nothing is pervasive in college. Instead of noblesse oblige, Ability, and "to each his own" (in the sense of classical distributive and commutative justice), our universities teach a crushing leveling that destroys not only aspiration but also imagination, reducing us to pawns and replaceable parts in the great machine, denying us our very humanity.
Truly, Pride is the source of all sin. In our arrogance to believe we can create an earthly Utopia, we have instead built the engines of Hell itself. And have willingly chained ourselves to them, selling our souls for trinkets and prizes that will not follow us in Death.
As you can tell, it can be very hard to stay "merry" with Despair and Melancholy greeting you as you rise every morning. So then, how do we go on? How are we not pulled down by our chains and torn from our souls?
Because we realize that the sting of Death is gone. That every Night must, inevitably, give way to Morning. And that even in a world as broken as ours, as fallen as ours, as unlivable as ours, we Are, we Live, and we CAN Rise above it. And that is why, in spite of the host arrayed against us, we continue to be merry and find comfort in the fact that we CAN, indeed, reclaim the age; that we can, in the end, "Redeem the Time."
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