Tune In, Turn Around, Drop Out

The following article is excerpted from the November issue of WND's Whistleblower magazine, titled "THE FLIGHT FROM PUBLIC SCHOOLS."

By Joseph Farah

If you are for constitutionally limited government, freedom, individual rights, self government, personal responsibility and accountability to God, you are a rebel in today's America.

The political-cultural status quo opposes all of that.

That's why our country is headed in the wrong direction. That's why we need to start over again with a clean slate. That's why we need a social and political revolution very much like the one that launched this great country in the 18th century.

We're not making progress. We're not expanding freedom. We're losing ground every passing moment.

Occasionally, the American people get a wake-up call and see this clearly for themselves. A good example came last summer. On June 26, 2001, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it was unconstitutional for government schools to ask students to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

The ruling stunned the nation. Radio talk-show hosts expressed outrage. A broad array of politicians denounced the decision. An avalanche of criticism prompted the judge responsible to place a stay on his own ruling.

Conservatives looked at the reaction to that ruling and saw something of a great political victory. Because of wide opposition, it seemed destined to be overturned. Maybe it will be. At least it was stayed.

But so what? What will be won if and when that decision is reversed? Will America be a better place, a freer place? Will the out-of-control judicial system responsible for the decision be reformed? Or will we have simply postponed the inevitable for another time?

I was not at all surprised by the ruling – and I really don't understand why any American would be. Sure it was wrong. Sure it had nothing to do with the Constitution. Sure it had nothing to do with common sense. But how much public policy in America today is right, constitutional, and derived of common sense?

Let's remember that in 1962 and 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that prayer in the schools was unconstitutional. The fact that it took nearly 40 years for the other shoe to drop is something of a surprise to me.

You see, there are people in America – some of them in positions of significant power – who want to remake America in their own images.

The trouble is, America is the first country in the world to be created in the image of a godly nation. The founders studied the Bible to see what it revealed about the way men should govern themselves. There was never a thought in their minds about creating a country divorced from God and His laws.

Over the years, extreme secularists, materialists, socialists, and others have chipped away at the American creed – at the Constitution, at the Declaration of Independence. They have tried to convince us those documents don't really mean what they say. They have tried to persuade us they are archaic and in need of updating. They have tried to explain that these statements are actually "living documents" subject to interpretation and reexamination under changing circumstances. They have even tried to suggest that the gifted and inspired leaders who invented America, despite their words and deeds to the contrary, were not really Bible-believing Christians.

These activists have brought government into every aspect of our lives – despite specific constitutional prohibitions against overreaching federal power.

Now the architects of that unconstitutional way of life tell us we must conform to their ungodly standards. We must do nothing to offend them. We must not be "intolerant."

We can yell and scream about this all we want. But it won't change the direction of this country. What will? To get there, we need to be sure of ourselves, our beliefs, our principles, our purpose in life, our convictions – and we must always know that God is on His throne. He is in control of the universe. He empowers those who do His will, follow His laws, live for Him, honor Him.

The founders were, almost all of them, sure about those things. They had courage. They knew what was right because they studied the Scriptures. They modeled their ideas of government on biblical precepts. They rejected ungodly government.

We must do the same.

We need to stop fighting defensively. We need to get on the offensive – the only way, after all, you can ever score points. What do I mean? The conservative way to fight an unconstitutional ruling like the Ninth Circuit case would be to do one or all of the following things:

• work for a reversal of the ruling  
• work for the impeachment of the judge  
• work for new legislation specifically authorizing the reading of the Pledge in schools

Those may seem like good tactics. They may seem like the right thing to do. And there is nothing wrong with any of those ideas. The only problem is that, at best, they maintain the status quo – for the moment. If successful, they do nothing to address the real problem – unaccountable government, cultural suicide, the continued march toward immorality, and relativism.

Victory in this case would be very fleeting indeed. The Marxist-Leninists of another generation understood what I am talking about. They had an expression – "two steps forward, one step back." Change, they knew, seldom came in dramatic style. It occurred gradually. And sometimes, for strategic reasons, it was worthwhile bending and yielding and allowing the other side to think it had achieved victory. That way they would be lulled into a false sense of complacency.

Another way to explain it is with the old frog-in-the-kettle analogy. I don't know if it's really true or not, but rumor has it that if you put a frog in a kettle and heat it slowly, the frog will relax and enjoy the increasing temperature. By the time it reaches the boiling point, it will be immobilized and unable to jump out of the pot. On the other hand, the story goes, if you heat the pot more quickly, the frog will be stunned by the rapidly increasing temperature and instinctively leap out to save itself.

Americans have been like that frog on a slow boil. We're conditioned to the slow degradation of our culture and political system. We're even comforted by the warmth it seems to generate with all of the seemingly lively debate. But the debate is an illusion. It's a deception. It only serves to disguise the fact that our goose is about to be cooked. So how do we fight back effectively?

It's time for all of us who realize we're in hot water to jump out of the pot.

Take, for example, the Pledge flap. Spending our time and money fighting only to bring America back to the sad state of affairs that existed before the ruling is not a victory. What freedom-loving Americans should do in response to a decision like that is to call the bluff of those turning up the heat on us.

You see, I think the Pledge ruling is a good example of a strategic mistake by those cooking up a new world order for us. Someone turned the heat up too fast. They miscalculated. Instead of increasing the temperature by one degree, it went up 10. Too many people noticed the fluctuation. They were surprised. They were awakened from their hot-tub complacency. Some realized this wasn't a Jacuzzi they were in; it was a cauldron.

For those who want their country back – the America of self-reliance, of individual rights, of personal responsibility, of rule of law, of limited government – the Pledge flap represented a golden opportunity to call the bluff of those slowly but surely transforming our society into one our founders would scarcely recognize.

How do we do that? How do we jump out of the hot pot?

Whenever Americans are stunned and momentarily awakened from their slumber by a political miscalculation such as the Pledge ruling, we need to use the opportunity to rally them to revolt.

What form does that revolt take? If we're lucky and we act soon, we may be fortunate enough to avoid the kind of violent conflict our forefathers endured. Our revolution, with God's grace, might look more like the Second Russian Revolution in which few shots were fired.

What the Russians did, you might recall, was simply say, "No."

That's what we need to say. For instance, the logical response to the Pledge ruling is to pull your poor children out of those government indoctrination centers known as schools. Every American outraged by the ruling should not even raise a whimper of protest. They should not argue. They should not complain. Instead, they should remove their children from these ungodly, hostile government schools. They should do it immediately. They shouldn't wait until the situation gets any worse.

The Pledge itself is not all that important, of course – not in the big scheme of things. There are much worse horrors taking place in government schools across America on a daily basis. Kids are taught techniques of aberrant sexual behavior. They are taught in a million ways that God is irrelevant to their education. They are taught pseudo-science cloaked in the "good citizenship" of environmentalism. They are intentionally denied the basic tools of self-government – knowledge of history, geography, and good reading and learning habits.

All of this intentional programming has gone on for more than 30 years because it was imposed slowly – like the gradually increasing temperature on the frog's kettle. But the Pledge ruling gave the cooking frog a start. And we've got to use those opportunities when they arise to awaken the sleeping populace.

I don't know how many parents get it. I don't know just what percentage of the population it represents. I don't know how many millions of people are awakening like that frog in the pot. But I do know it is a very significant number – close to the critical mass needed to start successful revolutions.

What is that magic number? The Bolsheviks boasted of 3 percent. Three percent! Is there a 3 percent remnant in America today? I believe the number is considerably bigger than that.

In days gone by, we would convince each other that the way to respond to the problems we see in American society is to "get involved." We would persuade our friends and family members and neighbors to vote, to join the PTA, to work on behalf of some politician, to give money to a political campaign.

The bad news is that those ideas don't work anymore. We're in such an advanced state of cultural and political decay that our efforts will only leave us disenchanted, discouraged, and demoralized. The good news is there's perhaps an easier way to achieve our objectives. We need to do what the Russians did when they ended seventy years of Soviet oppression. We need to just say no.

Saying no means pulling your kids out of those brainwashing hubs. Imagine what would happen if several hundred thousand parents did that this year – joining the growing millions who have already made that choice. Not only will you bring direct benefits to your kids – protecting them and providing them with the chance for a real education – but you will also be dropping out of the system, becoming part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Homeschooling is the best option. For those who can't do that, choose a worthy private institution. It will be the best choice you ever made for your children. There are a thousand reasons for making this choice. The Pledge ruling just makes it 1,001.

I say let the atheists have the government schools. Let the homosexual activists have them. Let the socialists have them. Let them fight out the curriculum issues among their multicultural, tolerant friends. Jews and Christians should get out now.

What will they have? Not much. Meanwhile, your children might actually get educated.

If responsible Christian and Jewish parents did this all over America tomorrow, it would set off a revolution in this country. Gone would be the multibillion-dollar Department of Education boondoggle. Gone would be the condom education. Gone would be the sexual propaganda and the moral relativism. No way tens of millions of parents are going to continue to be soaked in taxes for schools they don't use. Not only will your children be liberated, the whole country would be.

That kind of revolution would spread. Freedom would soon be breaking out all over America.

The alternative is the kind of pathetic protest we have seen for years. If you act like a doormat for 40 years, expect to be treated like one. If you invite abuse, expect it to continue. If you act like a slave, prepare to be treated like one.

This Pledge ruling may or may not stand the test of an appeal. That doesn't really matter. Either way, the schools are no longer your schools. You know that.

It's time for action, not words. It's time to be a part of the solution rather than part of the problem.

Just say no. Pull your children out.

This is the way parents should have responded 40 years ago to the U.S. Supreme Court rulings. They should have picked up their kids and gone home. Instead they succumbed. They adapted to the changing morality; they did what they were told. It's time for new tactics.

Get your children out and don't look back.

Don't try to reform government schools. It can't be done. Let's shut them down. Let's turn them into museums of misguided ideologies. Let's turn them into bomb shelters or something else useful to society.

The time to act is now. There simply may not be many more chances for freedom-loving Americans to respond, to take the initiative, to go on the offensive.