Many of us consume the headlines in the news each day. That’s the goal of newspapers and web content editors. To draw us in. To engage us with some outrageous position to entice us to dig deeper. Sometimes I’m enticed. More often than not, I am not engaged and move on to matters that don’t require screaming headlines to garner my interest.
Yet the headlines in America today paint a picture of our culture that should give the average person cause to worry. By “average,” I mean people who are concerned about the state of the traditional family, are engaged in raising children, work hard in their chosen profession, support the rule of law, respect the rights and dignity of other people—even those with whom they might disagree—and are God-fearing people who understand we live in a fallen world and turn to things spiritual for the strength to carry on. Normal traditional people. That term might be offensive to some. But for me, people like this are just normal. They’re looking for a productive and peaceful life — indeed, seeking the American dream. So, in that context, the headlines of today certainly give me pause to wonder about what motivates certain people to behave in ways that are destructive.
One of the more disturbing aspects we are witnessing is the inexplicable violence in America. Just this week, a deranged and wicked man planted a fire to lure firefighters into an ambush. He then summarily shot the unaware and vulnerable firemen as they began extinguishing the blaze he had started. Incomprehensible. And of course, we read this week how the horrible man who murdered four Idaho students as they slept will now benefit from a plea bargain that will spare him from the executioner. Having endured the retched pain of losing their loved ones, the families of those victims are compelled to accept a life imprisonment sentence for this evil and heartless killer.
Beyond overt violence, we also read of malevolent past policies of our government, which have resulted in countless illegal immigrant children being put in the hands of abusers and criminals. Kids were placed in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement and handed off to sponsors who were not vetted. Sadly, some of those kids, young girls, wound up impregnated and subjected to other abuse. Indeed, after the records of sponsors were traced, many turned out to have been convicted of serious crimes including hit-and-runs, attempted murder, prostitution, and drug trafficking. The role of the past government in this since 2021 is abhorrent.
Beyond the violence and pathetic bad policies, we’re also beset by a vicious antisemitism that is as bad as that of Nazi Germany’s 87 years ago. Our college campuses have exploded with hatred for Jews. Students have taken up the spiteful cause of terror groups that commit indescribable violence. What’s worse is these students deny the acts of Hamas—who murdered and tortured Jewish men, women, and children on 7 October 2023—with the same blindness that holocaust deniers use to discount Nazi death camps. It’s an indictment of our university culture that that is sickening.
Yet even in major cities in America, it is now acceptable to nominate for public office politicians who are unapologetic over Jew hatred and anti-Americanism. This past week, New York City Democratic voters elected a man to be their mayoral candidate, who refused to condemn rhetoric that encourages Jewish genocide, specifically to “globalize the intifada,” the Hamas objective to finally extinguish Israel. Fortunately, most normal Americans will not vote for a crackpot that wants to drive wealth from the community, institute city-owned grocery stores, defund the police, abolish rent, and otherwise turn America’s financial capital into a seething communist state.
Nonetheless, he will be enthusiastically supported by a generation of misinformed voters who think that freedom means free stuff. They have no clue. They have no true education. They have no awareness except that of rhythmic chants of hatred and nonsense. For them, it’s black and white. America is awful, terrorists are patriots, injustice for Jews is justice for others, reverse racism is virtue, and hate is the new love. I recall the words of the Lewis Carroll’s Mad Hatter when he declared this:
“If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrary wise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see?”
Yes, we do see. We see it in the violence. We see it in destructive policies. We see it in the generational rot that metastasizes from the sordid and putrid hatred on our college campuses. And we see it in the people they want to rule us. It’s quite “contrary wise.”
0 Comments