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Dennis Prager, writing at American Greatness diagnoses one of if not the biggest issue with our country. Where the Hell has wisdom gone?
In the present Age of No Wisdom, the best educated—usually the same people who most lack wisdom—dismiss the unique moral accomplishment of America’s founders because most of them owned slaves. Fools—the term for people who lack wisdom—judge the founders by our time, not by their time—a time when slavery was universal.
Wisdom can sometimes be a product of aging, but given how many old fools there are and how many young people have some degree of wisdom, it should be clear that wisdom, like math, a foreign language, or any other discipline, must be taught. Only then is one likely to become wiser with age. Otherwise, a young person without wisdom is most likely to become an old person without wisdom.
The wisest man I ever knew was my grandfather. He never got past 9th grade. But he understood that many truths are really not complicated, they are simple. The Founders of America were wise, they accepted that certain truths were basic. The right to worship, or not, the right to speak, to own property, to raise their kids, to associate with who you pleased, and the right to self-defense? Those were natural rights. Gifts from a Creator. No man or government gave those to mankind, so no man could take them away.
The Founders also were wise in seeing a future time when slavery would be gone, they put in place mechanisms for that to happen. Sadly, so many of us refuse to see that.
