by J.B. Shurk
As America’s Independence Day nears, I have found myself increasingly thinking of Lloyd Marcus and what his passing has meant. It is difficult to believe that it has almost been a year since his sudden death from a pulmonary embolism on July 24, the day after he and his wife, Mary, celebrated their 43rd wedding anniversary. So much has happened in America and around the world these last twelve months, and it saddens me that Lloyd isn’t around to make sense of those events for us with the context and meaning that only he could provide.
In the months leading up to last year’s “election,” when it became clear that the Democrats (and their Republican “useful idiots”) would do anything required to bring down President Trump, I always asked myself, “How would Lloyd have reacted to this nonsense?” When it became obvious that the One-Party State would ignore all the evidence for vote fraud in Democrat-controlled counties of battleground states and install a mumbling, groping halfwit in the White House to do its bidding, I wondered just what Lloyd would say and do. As this new 1984 “digital curtain” has descended around us and as it has become incontrovertible that Biden’s America will be one of mass censorship and political persecution, I always think about which fights Lloyd would take up first in the contests ahead.
There’s no doubt in my mind he’d be fighting — writing and rallying and pushing Americans to open their eyes to the evils of Critical Race Theory, the vile use of the China Virus to steal Americans’ liberties, and the unholy partnership between Silicon Valley and the Intelligence Community to turn patriotic Americans into domestic terrorists. “CRT is un-American and anti-Christian and as Communist as it gets,” I think he’d say. I know he would be spitting fire against the Maoist police state taking over, and I’m certain he would have taken the FBI and the U.S. military to the woodshed for abandoning America’s ideals by choosing to intimidate, punish, and silence Americans who think for themselves. Yet he would have done so with such humor and grace and genuine concern for our nation that none who came across his words would have been able to dismiss the wisdom contained therein.
I love reading Lloyd’s words because they are so honest and true. He wrote, as Kurt Vonnegut once advised in an essay, “How to Write with Style,” in a way that was distinctly his own. Whether he was describing his childhood in Baltimore or recalling his time in showbiz or retelling stories from his Tea Party travels, Lloyd brought you into his world, allowed you to look around and see the wondrous things he saw, and sent you away with a fuller heart and a lighter step. He had the rare ability to be at once tender and fierce, compassionate and boisterous. He saw so much good in the world and so much good in others, yet he never backed away from a fight with evil or the evildoers who had the bad luck to cross his path. He was part Renaissance man, musician, and poet, but he was also a truth-teller extraordinaire and a happy warrior, to boot. Above all else, he was a Christian and a loving, devoted husband. It is just an unassailable fact: there was nobody like Lloyd Marcus.
I have often been struck by how truthful it seems that “only the good die young.” Sometimes I wonder if God occasionally looks down at some of His creations and says, “Yep, you’ve figured out what I’ve set forth for you to learn in this world, you’ve accomplished it ahead of most, and it’s time for you to come home.” Too often, it is the person who has given us so much who leaves long before we’re ready, and when that person is gone, the void left behind is a monument larger than anything cut from marble. Lloyd was obviously one of those people, because his absence is felt everywhere.
I wonder whether feeling that absence is the point — whether the lesson for those of us left behind is carved by that pain. Perhaps it is God’s way of saying to us, “Do you see now what you are missing? Do you see that you must step up and fill the space that Lloyd’s absence has left?” This one man traveled all over the country to rally Americans in defense of their freedoms. He lifted their spirits with song, gave them courage by standing firmly for his convictions, made them smile as he touched one life after the next with his words and music. And we each honor him by doing what we can to step into his shoes and further his message, even if each one of us alone would be too small for the task. In his last essay for American Thinker, published just the day before his death, Lloyd said as much: “We have so much work to do. This is all hands on deck.”
We do have so much work left to do. Because Lloyd carried so much of that burden on his own shoulders, the battles for America’s future will be all the heavier still. But I will often think of Lloyd Marcus and the happiness he brought all of us, and because his love for this country was so great, remembering him on the Fourth of July seems fitting and right. So light a sparkler for a great man; become a happy warrior, too; and let’s see his mission through.
Image: Lloyd Marcus via YouTube.
