Though I Was Blind, Now I See

By Don Marshall

The author has also recorded an audio version for those who prefer to listen

My assignment is writing a short, biographical piece. Problem is, I hate writing about myself and my bio is pretty boring. On that basis, I choose to ignore the letter of the assignment while trying to fulfill its spirit. If nothing else, I’m kind of old, firmly within Generation X. That means I’ve seen some things through the decades. Some of those things seemed trivial at the time, but now I understand them in a completely new light. With that, sit back and let an old man tell you some stories about the good ol’ days.

The summer of 1985 was a great one. Reagan was president and I was a huge fan. Back to the Future, The Goonies, European Vacation, and American Ninja were in theaters. When you turned on the radio you got to hear new music from the likes of Billy Joel, Aretha Franklin, Dire Straits, and Prince. McDonalds still cooked their fries in beef tallow and I had a great summer job.

A local conservation group hired a small group of us teenaged boys to cut a new hiking trail through the Appalachian Mountains. It was our job to scout the terrain and decide where we wanted the trail. We got to wander overland through the wilderness to find the most spectacular falls and cliffs and to build the trail where we saw fit. We had starting and ending points, but beyond that it was all up to us.

Instead of driving back to town every night, we lived in a dilapidated cabin provided by our employers. The floor in the kitchen was rotten and unsafe. The carpet was filthy and threadbare. We didn’t care that the place should have been condemned, though. At least for a while, it was our house and we were in charge. During that summer in which we lived and worked on our own in the forest, our only supervision was from a college undergrad student named Jim. And Jim was the only problem we had that summer.

You see, Jim was woke, though none of us had ever heard the word. We didn’t know what his problem was. We just knew he was supremely irritating and downright crazy. He had a foul temper and his frequent meltdowns were great entertainment for us. What triggered these explosions? His wokeness. We were a handful of middle class Southern boys and Jim was a communist revolutionary in training (literally, as it turned out). In other words, we were the bourgeoisie and therefore his mortal enemies.

I know this only in hindsight. At the time, none of us understood Jim’s erratic behavior. It was obvious that he hated middle class white boys, but never would I have recognized him as a communist. I was well aware of communism—it was the era of Reagan! Everyone was, and just about everyone hated it. Communism, not terrorism or white males, was the great, universal enemy. Even though the revolution was well under way, and even though I dealt with an actual revolutionary every day, it never occurred to me that Jim was a communist. We had all been taught the evils of communism and, more generally, totalitarianism. We could recognize a communist state, but not a communist revolution.

Over the next few decades, I went to college, hated it, and dropped out to join the Marine Corps (had I not dropped out, I’m sure they would have kicked me out as I spent my time drinking instead of studying). After my one enlistment, I returned to college only to drop out again, this time because a software consulting firm hired me out of the classroom. It was the middle of the dot-com boom of the 1990s and I had been studying math and computer science. With a lucrative programming job in a major city, life was wonderful.

I stuck with that until, when I reached middle age, I wanted something more. As much as I enjoyed programming, corporate life didn’t suit me. Isn’t this a midlife crisis? Whatever, I wanted more and always had an interest in Christianity. Though I was raised in the Episcopal Church, I was never very faithful in anything apart from attendance. Eventually, I forsook that, too. Now officially over the hill, I finally converted to Christ. Really. And from the moment I did, I wanted to preach and it wasn’t terribly long until I did just that.

This brings us to 2015, a turbulent time. It was Obama’s second term and I well knew that he was a communist. Civil unrest had begun with Treyvon Martin, a new group of race baiters called Black Lives Matter, and violent riots over Freddie Gray in Baltimore. The mayor of Baltimore said at a press conference that she had instructed police to “make sure that the protesters were able to exercise their right to free speech”¹.

Come again? Aren’t the police supposed to arrest arsonists, vandals, and thugs who assault citizens? According to Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, no. She had instructed police to give “those who wished to destroy space to do that as well”². The communist revolution that had been simmering in America for generations was coming to a boil.

But that was way up in Baltimore, and I was preaching for a rural, Southern congregation. As part of that ministry, I led a series of community Bible studies that put me in close contact with two woke agitators or, as they were then called, social justice warriors. One was the pastor of a nearby Presbyterian Church (USA). The other was a third-wave feminist grad student and activist who did enough of “the work” to get a brief mention on national news for a protest she organized. The pastor lied about his politics and claimed to be a rock-ribbed conservative, but the grad student proudly called herself a social justice warrior.

Neither of these shared the short temper or violent insanity that Jim had showcased 30 years before. Both were capable of rational conversation and we had many of them (separately—they didn’t know each other). I understood well enough what they were, but was still blind to the threat they presented. That’s because I still thought that we just had different political opinions, and that reason could show them the error of their ways. Little did I understand that I was, in fact, dealing with zealots who belonged to a cult. I did not know that communism is a religion, not an economic system and not a mere political persuasion.

The pastor was subverting his congregation (the denomination was already woke, having just endorsed same-sex marriage) and the grad student would go on to marry a Muslim and move to Washington, DC where they would go to work for NGOs. I often wonder how marriage between a third-wave feminist and a Muslim goes and whether the cuts to USAID cut their paychecks, but I digress.

Over the three decades between 1985 and 2015 I had plenty of other encounters with woke people, but I could see a difference that I found shocking. In 1985, Jim was an anomaly. He belonged in a circus side show. Nobody took him seriously and nobody connected his bizarre behavior and ideas with communism. Thirty years later, people like Jim were everywhere and the social justice warriors were clearly communists. The feminist grad student actually defended Stalin’s mass murder. The Presbyterian pastor said Jesus was feminine. Still, woke was a problem for the left and I still framed it as nothing more than fringe, radical, leftist politics that sane Democrats would eventually tamp down.

Fast forward another decade to the era of COVID. It wasn’t until the last five years that I heard James Lindsay explain communism as a religious cult, and it wasn’t until he started sounding the alarm about woke infecting the right that I understood groups like the Hammerskins and the Klan (yes, that Klan) as woke. During the 1980s I had multiple run ins with both, but those stories will have to wait. But woke was no longer far away and woke was definitely now my problem.

I no longer preach to a congregation, but I am not done preaching. When I joined the Marine Corps, I swore an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States. When I became a Christian, I became the brother of every other Christian. In 2025, woke threatens the Constitution and all of my brothers and sisters in Christ, but that threat no longer just comes from the left. It now also attacks from the right, and it pains me greatly to see patriots and Christians fall for the ruse. We must fight this ideological poison. We must work to expose it for the evil that it is.

Writing about myself is not something that interests me and, frankly, my life has been normal enough not to be interesting to anyone else. However, with whatever small voice I have, I am morally obligated to set my feet and shout truth as loudly as I can. God willing, I can help someone else recognize and withstand the flood of lies that threatens to carry us all away. Thank you so much to James Lindsay for shedding so much light on the esoteric threat that looms over us, and thank you so much to Correspondence Theory for giving me the opportunity to sound off about it in my own way. There are many, good people out there who have been fighting this fight for a long time. It is my pleasure and honor to stand with them. It is my hope that I might prove in some small way useful. May God be with us all and grant us victory and peace.

1. CBS Baltimore. (2015, December 28). Baltimore mayor: “gave those who wished to destroy space to do that.” CBS News. https://www.cbsnews.com/baltimore/news/baltimore-mayor-gave-those-who-wished-to-destroy-space-to-do-that/

2. Ibid.

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Don Marshall is a normal Christian who loves his country and the liberties upon which it is founded. He is dedicated to doing what he can to prevent radical revolutionaries from destroying it, whether from the left or right.