Every year, the new freshmen arrive at Wyoming Catholic College a month ahead of regular classes, and I am always impressed with the distances they have come to be here. This year’s students traveled from 25 different states and four foreign countries (Belize, Canada, Ireland, and Ukraine). Already, even before their 21-day trip in the mountains, they have done something heroic and counter-cultural by leaving behind the known world of home and undertaking an adventure of discovery. This year in particular—with inflation spiraling upward, with a pervasive sense of the social fabric coming undone, with the government shamelessly using coercion to impose wokeness, override religious conscience, and liberate us from the habits of liberty—I think of Yeats’s “Lapis Lazuli,” his great poem on the rise and fall of civilizations. Midway through his meditation, Yeats imagines great migrations like those we have seen in our own time by people trying to escape oppression: “On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,/Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back.”
See the full article by Glenn Arbery, July 29, 2022