RE: http://www.firstprinciplesjour...25&theme=hiedu&loc=f

As a current college student, I can attest to Bruce Thornton's observations on the postmodern therapeutics fed to those in the classroom today - and at a rather conservative school, no less.

While there is much to worry about, there is also lots of good being done. Admittedly, the work ahead of us is great if we are to revivify the spirit of American exceptionalism that has been transmogrified into "tired jingoism."

The root of the problem seems to me that history is morally judged from the viewpoint of a 21st century liberal, the proverbial lotus-eater who enjoys an easier life due to their far superior political clime. Therefore, Booker T. Washington becomes branded as an "accomodationalist" because he did not employ the same strategy that MLK did in black leadership as if there were no anachronistic considerations for the historian and 1898 was the same as 1963. Or the Founders were hypocrites who perpetuated an unjust institution -- rather than the brave few who started a political regime based on an idea that, while it was prudentially infeasible to practice immediately, could serve as a guiding light to the nation in its political darkness -- slavery always being on the path to ultimate extinction.

This is scoffed at. Demands for radical egalitarianism insist the problem lays deep in America's heart, in its very essence. But there is nothing wrong with America. We should remember Frederick Douglass, the former slave, as he responded to William Lloyd Garrison's calls to burn the Constitution:

"Good and wholesome laws are often found dead on the statute book. We may condemn the practice under them and against them, but never the law itself. To condemn the good law with the wicked practice, is to weaken, not to strengthen our testimony. It is no evidence that the Bible is a bad book, because those who profess to believe the Bible are bad. The slaveholders of the South, and many of their wicked allies in the North, claim the Bible for slavery; shall we, therefore, fling the Bible away as a pro-slavery book? "

The imprdue