To be born in Spain…

To travel thousands of miles across the Atlantic on a wind-driven ship without the modern assurances of radio and GPS to save your life, an experience in which howling winds, giants waves and omnipresent cold remind you how easy it is for you to die upon the endless sea…

To travel thousands of miles, mostly on foot, across the rugged wilds of Old Mexico, and then push beyond the limits of the known world into New Mexico, where mountain cold, scorching desert, and hostile Indians also remind you how easy it is die upon this endless sea of land…

To take what you need with you for the sake of starting a new civilization so remote from everything you’ve ever known, knowing you will likely never see your family again, knowing you will never see your homeland again, knowing how easy it is to die for many more reasons like disease and famine, in spite of bountiful harvests and numerous cattle…

And succeed! Succeed because of a courage and a resolution we moderns don’t have! Succeed because of a holy faith we moderns don’t have today! I understand the name Santa Fe.

Truly, we moderns take much for granted. We live in a safe and padded world. We live a life of such comfort and ease that it’s impossible to imagine how harsh life was once upon a time.

And then travel thousands of miles away from civilization, from everything you’ve ever known, to build a new one nowhere near the ocean where sailing ships from Europe could resupply you with basics! That’s amazing. The Spaniards did this. The Portuguese, Dutch and English didn’t. Their nuclear colonies were by the sea.

True, French Voyageurs went far into the hinterlands of North America. They traveled by canoe with Indians up the St. Lawrence, to the Great Lakes, to the Saskatchewan, to the Mississippi, and beyond, to trap fur. Their courage was legendary. I wish to know more about them. But they didn’t build a civilization in the interior, far away from sea-sailing ships. After all, Quebec and Montreal had access to the sea by the St. Lawrence.

But Santa Fe could not. That it survived throughout the centuries and still exists today is a source of profound wonder to me, and I appreciate that wonder, and it makes me want to know its history more. New Mexico has a very different history compared to all other American states, and the evidence of this are those old Spanish building still standing after 400 years. That’s cool stuff.

To most nowadays, however, remnants of the Spanish Empire in the United States are no sources of wonder. The old buildings are no more remarkable than Taco Bells. Their histories are no more remarkable than the history of breakfast burritos. They are just things that exist. Nothing more.

And this is tragic. It’s indicative of the stressors and poisons of the modern world that kill the soul and prevent it from experiencing the joy of wonders, in history, in nature, in any field where wonder can ignite (and there is probably no limit to where wonder can ignite the in human mind). Not being capable of experiencing the joy of wonder means the quality of life is diminished. It means life is robotic and soulless and, ultimately, only about filling in the time until death.

I say the above not with judgment. I say it not to exalt my intellect above others who do not know wonder. I don’t care about the vanity of self-exaltation. Rather, from the bottom of my heart, I feel pity for those who don’t know wonder. But they still can know it! Clear and impassioned words making points their crappy teachers in government schools never taught them, I say, can do this.

But there are people more unfortunate. There are people who have chosen the dark side, and their minds will remain closed. They think their hate is love, that their regressive ideologies are progressive ideologies, and that their destruction is building back better. Most are modern liberals.

Yes, most modern liberals are trained to hate those Spaniards whose holy faith made Santa Fe. They regard those Spaniards ONLY as rapacious violators of some utopian existence in North America before the white man. I fully admit many were rapacious. I fully admit many Europeans committed atrocities in the New World. After all, atrocity is inherent to all civilizations – including the pre-columbian New World which was no utopia at all.

And this is beside the point! Even if every single Spaniard, even if every single white person from any European country that came to the New World, were only rapacious murderers, it is still remarkable that the civilizations they built have endured through time. This wide spread of Europeans across the earth, across oceans and continents, was a new thing. What civilization had made themselves so widespread before?

And there were some Europeans of the true faith! There were some who came to spread the Gospel around the world in fulfillment of some of the most remarkable words ever written in Matthew 24:14! There were some who saw it as their mission to bring the light of Christianity to the dark corners of the earth where the heathen knew not the ways of a civilization that would allow mankind to multiply like never before.

Modern liberals scoff at the courage, resilience, and faith not just of Spaniards but of all Europeans who came to build a New World. They will not listen to anyone who challenges their paradigms. They will not listen to anyone who will make them think beyond the walls in their minds. All they think they need to know is “White man evil.”

Modern liberals hate the masculine achievements of Europeans from the past, and how those achievements changed the world because, deep down, they know their dysphoria will never build anything that lasts. They don’t know how to build. They only know how to destroy.

Regardless, you will never get me to hate my ancestors. You will never get me to hate Europeans for how they changed the world. I’m grateful they came to the Americas. I’m grateful to live in the United States of America, and I’m grateful my mind is not so closed that I can’t see old buildings in New Mexico as remarkable remnants of remarkable people from long ago.

Simply that Santa Fe still exists is a point of wonder.