Sometimes the truth is too painful or offensive to speak directly, so we tell it by means of a story. An old joke goes that while a sensitive eight-year-old boy was away for his first summer at camp, his beloved tabby cat, Rufus, got crushed by a passing car. His overprotective parents decided to break the bad news to him gradually, so their first note said that Rufus had climbed on the roof, and wouldn’t come down. He worried at night, but didn’t despair. The next week he got a note that the fire department had tried but failed to catch the cat. The boy sulked a little, but he didn’t fall apart. On the third week, he learned that Rufus had disappeared, and probably would not be found. He cried for a while, but having been gradually prepared for losing Rufus, he took the news pretty well. Then a few weeks later, the boy got a fresh new note that informed him, “Your grandma is up on the roof….”
Ladies and gentlemen, our country is up on the roof, and with it our fragile liberty. Since we care about these good things even more for our descendants than for ourselves, in fact it is our children and grandchildren trapped on the roof — the roof of the White House, peering down with tearful eyes and trembling fingers to see if the next President who comes to inhabit it will offer them a ladder down to safety… or will set the place on fire.
We didn’t get here by accident. There were wise men who foresaw it, whose sensitivities as artists let them craft works of fiction that warned the West where it was headed. They weren’t heeded. But there is still time to learn from them now. So here’s a gift list of five prophetic novels, which I recommend that you read, then hand out to well-meaning friends who don’t quite “get” the gravity of the threats to faith and freedom. Each book is listed by the crisis that it predicted.