Mr. Hilles, your story astonished me, and I returned to read it several times. If I sound harsh, even judgmental, please don’t take it personally. I am hoping your reply will change my mind. But right now, I am genuinely appalled. What you have shared about yourself is as tragic, as it is frightening.

Your parents were good role models. Every night, they spent half an hour fulfilling their civic responsibilities. They watched the news, they made their children watch with them, they kept themselves informed and they cast informed votes. Of course, the news was boring. Facts are boring. But your parents listened because facts mattered to them. You belittle their civic example, by saying, “The family sat every night and watched a boring half hour of network news, which my parents trusted as unquestioned fact.” Mr. Hilles, if your parents did not discuss politics in front of you, how do you know they trusted everything they heard on the news? You insult your parents by saying they liked Walter Cronkite’s voice – did you think your parents too stupid to understand his words?

In your parents’ generation, Americans were such informed, engaged, and astute citizens that the media could never get away with the kind of shit they do today. Think not? Your parents’ civic values are the reason that civics was a required course when you went to school. In my state, civics was two semesters long and students had to pass a civics exam to graduate high school. Your parents raised you to be an American citizen – not a party member. You rejected your parent’s teachings and I suspect that is the reason you are a conservative today.

Are you proud of the legacy your generation is leaving behind? Today only 19 states require students to pass a civics exam to graduate high school. 11 states have no civics requirements – at all. Today, less than 30% of all Americans can name the 3 branches of government.

Mr. Hilles, there is nothing, remotely, traditional in your belief system. American Evangelism is a political enterprise – rooted in political ambitions and the lust for wealth and power. It was born in a 1970 memo circulated among American millionaires and billionaires.

Listen closely sir, and you will hear traditional Christianity in the streets of protest, the voices of workers quitting their jobs, and people turning away from politics so that they might speak of love, peace and hope to each other, once again.

What is that proverb about a log in your eye?