Bad things begin with good intentions. Anyone who’s tried to replicate something from Pinterest can attest to that. There are more important things than food or crafts, though, that bear out this truth. Some things start out good and go bad, and some things don’t even start out good; they are a result of good intentions, but short-sighted and disastrous.

The feminist movement shared its early days with some very good things that were done by women such as Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony. They both championed the abolitionist movement, the right for women to own property, retain their own earnings, and vote. Ms. Anthony, a Quaker, believed drinking alcohol was sinful and supported the temperance movement. It probably began prior to the 1960’s, but that decade was the one that took a good thing down a different road. Suddenly women’s rights to own property and vote became women’s rights to terminate their pregnancies, or to use more honest language, to kill their unborn babies. A good intention, and I assert a good movement, went very, very wrong.

The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, had at its core good intentions of helping people without insurance get it like others who had jobs that provided it as part of their wages, what many refer to as a job benefit. At least most people who supported it had good intentions. Some people have benefited from this government intervention into healthcare. However, much more was lost than gained, which is why a majority acknowledge it was bad from the beginning. Another result has been many hard-working folks who have lost the doctors they preferred because provider access changed, the same hard-working folks who have experienced decreased income due to higher insurance premiums, companies that have closed down under the burden of regulation, and lost jobs for the people who worked at those companies. Is it possible that due to the burden of requirements from this well-intentioned idea, the quality of the healthcare in a nation known for its high standards and impressive treatment discoveries will decrease? Yes.

I truly believe most people have good intentions. They want to help. Helping, however, requires a look not just at the present moment, but also a look at the future results of what we do in the present moment.

When I’ve visited the south and seen a confederate flag or symbol, I’ve thought it a bit quirky and, frankly, out of touch. I’ve thought, “It’s time to let go of the war, people. You lost it in 1865, so that means we are one nation, not two. 150 years is too long to pout.” I still don’t understand it, and I’m willing to wager that many of the folks who display those flags haven’t put a lot of their own thinking into it either. The problem with saying, then demanding that something like this be taken down or destroyed is that it tramples on their freedom. It tramples on something else, too: Our nation’s history.

The surest path to destruction of a camp or college or country is to remove its history. The older ones might remember it, but like all things unreviewed those memories will fade. The younger ones will never learn it. That’s happening now in our public schools and in the town square. After the Civil War flags are removed, there will be demands for historical monuments to be removed. Oh, not all of them. Not at first and maybe not all of them ever. But enough of them to change the citizenry’s understanding of history. To erase it. To replace it with another image or narrative.

I am looking down our nation’s road. The change of narrative is, in fact, close enough that I see it in the distance. Or maybe not even much of a distance at all.

Carl F. H. Henry, author of Twilight of a Great Civilization, says, “There is a new barbarism . . . not simply rejecting the legacy of the West, but embracing a new pagan mentality where there is no fixed truth.”

Et tu, Brute?

Photo:800px-Mountain_Road_in_Corfu-wikimediacommons.org_.jpg, creative commons attribution share alike-3.0 unported; Quote: Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare