Is Portland Our Future?    

           Excerpts from an article by a Dakota State Univ. professor. Part 1 of 2 

   This is the belief that perfected human society is within sight and needs just one little further push. That what religions promise for the end time can be brought about in the meantime, with only a little effort - a little revolution and revaluation of values. A little spilled blood.  

   You find that perfected human society in the killing fields (where they executed more than a million Cambodians in the 1970s, in the firm belief they were bringing about a peaceable utopia).  

   Or, the Cultural Revolution (where Mao Zedong's "Red Guards" killed as many as 20 million Chinese in the late 1960s, in the name of true communism).  

   Violence in U.S. cities today comes with Democratic party figures who pay the  bail of radical protesters, all undeterred in liberal cities. Agitation makes Antifa and Black Lives Matter useful weapons for defeating Republicans - all in the mad belief that radicals can be dealt with easily, once the hated opponent has been eliminated. 

   In my book, "An Anxious Age," I argued that current generations of radically tinged Americans are "post-Protestants," children of people who once filled dying mainline churches. Certainly, they manifest some of the worst social norms: a conviction of their own moral rectitude and a feeling of superiority to the unenlightened. 

Tomorrow: Spiritual anxieties