by Caryn Boddie
It happened that, as I was thinking about writing about my husband and me being canceled by our own children six months ago â we have been agonizing about not being able to talk to them or see our grandson for all that time â a thought popped into my mind:Â blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Weeks ago, while struggling with how to understand what has happened, I picked up a copy of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals.  Then I looked at a book by David Horowitz entitled Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model.  What I read convinced me that our family, more so our children, had been targeted.  We, as a middle-class family who used to live together in the suburbs, were in the bull’s eye.
Consider the last chapter of Rules, which was published in 1971. It is entitled “The Way Forward.”  Alinsky writes, “Organization for action will now and in the decade ahead center upon America’s white middle class.  That is where the power is[.] … Large parts of the middle class, the ‘silent majority,’ must be activated[.]”
The left has been working on making the children of the middle class into radicals, turning them against their parents and their parents’ values for fifty years now, in multiple generations.  All the things we middle-class parents believed in and called good, our children now call bad and false, and more than bad and false, worthy of destruction, especially if we parents are Christian and conservative, and even more so if we are Trump-supporters.  Our cancelation is the fruit of the left’s strategy to remake America.
It was shocking to us that our children canceled us for being who and what we are; we have tried to be good and true parents, faithful and patriotic.  We are heartbroken, blame ourselves, blame our children, reach out and plead and cajole, pray and pray and pray and ask others to pray, too.
It is not just we.  This is happening to many middle-class families.  For example, I met a friend the other day, and she told me she has several friends whose children are canceling them.  One of them is a mother with whom my friend was close as their kids grew up.  She said this person was an excellent mother, but now her son will have nothing to do with her and is calling her an abusive mother.
My friend’s own son canceled her and her husband, too.  The son told his mother that everything they taught him was a lie.  Before he canceled them, he forbade his mother to talk to him about God anymore.
Years ago, my children also told me I was not allowed to talk to them about God anymore.
Both of us told our children that we would not proselytize, but we could not promise never to mention God because we are people of faith; it is who we are.
When my husband posted on Facebook about our plight, more than a few friends responded that they were going through the same things.  One mother said her three children will have nothing to do with her anymore and had recently left her out of a family wedding.  She said she is also a person of faith.
What is going on is evil.  Just evil.  Have our children been caught in evil’s trap?
I’m afraid so.  The sad truth is that behind the strategy of the left is an admiration of, and devotion to, Lucifer, also known as Satan.  Proof of this is in the preface of Alinsky’s book, where he praises “the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom â Lucifer.”
And leftism is cultlike.  It demands that young people give up God.  Then they are required to convert their parents â remember how President Obama told kids to go home and talk to their parents at Thanksgiving â and, if they will not convert, children must distance themselves from parents as punishment.
David Horowitz writes about the evil of the left and about how the left is intent on building a Utopia on Earth to meet their vision of a great society.  Of those from the suburbs who have been activated, he writes, “In his own mind, the radical is building his own kingdom, which to him is a kingdom of heaven on earth.  Since a kingdom of heaven built by human beings is a fantasy â an impossible dream â the radical’s only real world efforts are those which are aimed at subverting the society he lives in.  He is a nihilist.”
What comes to mind are the faces of Antifa thugs we have seen in mug shots on the internet over the past year.  They look like so many sons and daughters of suburban families.  Heartbreaking.
You might be thinking, come on, you are just bad parents who were abusive, and you are just making excuses.  Your kids were justified in canceling you.
I am confident that we were good parents.  Not abusive.  We are somewhat meek people â good folks according to a neighbor â who were devoted to our children, who invested in our children and then cheered them on through their education and as they left to travel the world and begin careers on the East Coast.
Oh, wait!  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.  That’s Matthew 5:5.  But let’s go on.
When Donald Trump was running for president, my husband voted for him, but I could not.  After he was president, we both supported him.  Our kids did hate Trump with a passion, the same passion those around them expressed, an almost demonic hatred.
When the pandemic hit the USA, we did everything we were supposed to do to take care of ourselves, so our kids would not worry, and then we got vaccinated as soon as they could.  However, we did express concern in Colorado to our governor about lockdowns.  That upset our daughter, who was working on the pandemic response.  We apologized.
When the riot at the Capitol happened on January 6, 2021, that was the last straw for our children, or should I say, that was the best excuse.  They canceled their parents.  No calls on Mother’s Day.  No calls on Father’s Day â even though we were not in D.C. that day, we were not at the Capitol, and we condemned the riot.
Nothing we did or said helped, and the children, perhaps to justify their decision to cancel their own parents, let it be known in one of the last conversations we had that they were now going to look at childhood issues; in other words, they would be finding rationale for their decision.  Six months out from January 6, we are still canceled.
It is a spiritual battle.  For sure.  Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.
Caryn Boddie writes for Meadowlark Press, LLC in Colorado.
Image via Public Domain Pictures.
