Declaration of Cultural Independence
Once, not so very long ago, America was a good place to live. Families were strong and stable. One breadwinner, almost always the father, brought home enough income to give a whole family a middle class standard of living. Wives and mothers could devote themselves to making good homes and rearing their children. Those children played in safe neighborhoods, surrounded by good neighbors. They went to schools that inculcated discipline, built character and taught reading, writing and arithmetic well. Entertainment was moral, instructive and healthy. Civilization was passed successfully from one generation to another, and even improved a bit along the way.
Today, that America has become a memory. Divorce and illegitimacy have shattered families and crippled children. Taxation and consumerism together have made the single-breadwinner middle class family a rare exception. Children are left to grow up on their own, learning from their peers rather than their parents. Childhood itself is disappearing, as young children are left to face adult situations alone and without guidance.
Public schools have become "attendance centers," as some are now openly called. Some are little more than holding pens for illiterate young ruffians. Few effectively teach even the most basic skills. Rather, their concern is inculcating the "attitudes" demanded by the reigning ideology of Political Correctness.
The entertainment industry is a bottomless sewer, inverting good and evil and flooding the land with sex, violence and degradation of every sort. Video games desensitize children to killing by turning people into objects. Television "normalizes" every deviance, including homosexuality and the inversion of the traditional roles of men and women. Popular music glorifies killers and reduces women to whores.
The high arts are almost dead. Art and architecture are intended to be ugly and alienating. Serious music has become a self-parody. Publishers seek not good writing but "celebrity" authors. The news media values sensationalism over facts.
All these are classic, age-old signs of a culture that is self-destructing. A growing number of Americans know how to read these signs. They realize that, despite economic prosperity, America is becoming a foreign country, foreign to everything that once defined Americans as a people. Indeed, as Political Correctness demands, we are no longer one people. "Multiculturalism" has changed our national motto into ex uno, plura: from one, many.
What is to be done? When a man finds himself in a sewer, his first objective is to get out of it. In a culture that has become a sewer, our first objective must be the same: to get out of that culture, and to create an alternative to it.
Until recently, the objective of cultural conservatives, those Americans who still adhere to our ancient, Western, Judeo-Christian culture, was to retake existing cultural institutions - the public schools, the universities, the media, the entertainment industry and the arts - from those hostile to our culture and make them once again forces for goodness, truth and beauty. We sought to do so primarily through politics, by electing fellow cultural conservatives to high office and expecting them, once elected, to use politics to help restore our traditional culture.
Unfortunately, we must acknowledge that this strategy has not been successful. Despite some political successes, the culture has continued to deteriorate. In part, this is because some of the people we elected abandoned their principles once they were in office. But the larger reason is that culture is more powerful than politics. The tide of cultural degradation and decay is simply too strong for any political barrier to stem.
When one strategy fails, the proper response is not to surrender but to adopt a different strategy. We, the undersigned, therefore pledge ourselves to a strategy of cultural Independence. We hereby declare our Independence from the decayed, modern or post-modern culture and pledge our efforts toward creating new institutions built upon the values of our traditional, inherited Western culture.
We seek nothing less than the creation of a complete, alternate structure of parallel cultural institutions. Home schooling is an example: faced with the failure of the public schools, home schoolers have created a separate, parallel system of education, a system that revives our traditional values and culture and transmits them to a new generation. What home schoolers have done in primary and secondary education, we seek to do also in higher education, media, entertainment, the arts, every aspect of popular and, eventually, high culture as well.
The task is a vast one. But the talents and energies of Americans who still adhere to our traditional culture are also vast. When mobilized effectively, in the late 1970s and 1980s, they had profound if temporary effects on our nation's politics. Now, the challenge is to mobilize them again, not in hopes of evanescent gains in politics, but in service of a more solid goal, the goal of creating our own institutions and through them recovering our identity as a people.
To that task we pledge our talents, our treasure, and our abilities, to work on scales small or great as our circumstances allow. Out of the wreckage of the country once called America we will build a new, moral and pleasant land.
Cory Burnell
