Injustice Anywhere
The ideology of being soft on evil.
Every once in a while something makes me cry. Weeping comes more easily when reading the right book or letting the emotion of a touching film run its course in silent tears. But shuddering sobs and moans come maybe once a year.
Twenty minutes ago, I read this story in The Free Press. It clobbered me.
I have been thinking about Christopher Hitchens recently as I have gotten into discussions about atheism. If I’ve ever had an intellectual hero it would be Hitchens who had impressed me as the rare sort with an encyclopedic knowledge of history, of letters, and whose courageous practice of writing and speaking out became his habit. Hitchens and Martin Amis were the pair. I once got the chance to ask him a question at a presentation at UCLA. He almost never failed to impress me and those he brought to my attention, Murray, Hirsi Ali and Ferguson retain my respect to this day.
Last night I watched one of the best dramas I’ve seen in quite some time. The film Conclave reminded me of my own Catholic education, my respect for formality, the practice of forgiveness, the burdens of stewardship and the character of ambition.
As a writer, an outsider to the world of arts and letters, I have striven to comprehend its ways and means at the very core of our civilization’s need to communicate values and knowledge over generations. It was never enough for me to learn how to talk to computers, and though I might be replaced in my employment by robots, I’ll never regret how I have learned to use English to talk to you.
It is in reflection over these matters combined with my early defense of multiculturalism in my mid 20s that brought me to tears this morning upon the revelation of how cracked our civilization has become. I don’t think I can simply shrug it off as a Stoic. I am deeply offended and pained by the discovery that for any reason whatsoever people are so morally compromised by their ideologies and allegiances that they allow the rape of girls to pass unpunished.
I have alluded to and beat around the bush in my mention of the Secular Northstar, my pale attempt to setup some way of thinking about a set of values we might all live by. I still find that we sustain in our consumer economies and non-religious disciplines a disheartening dialog that keeps trying to persuade us toward political correctness and ideological fidelity rather than human virtue. Sometimes at the very expense of human virtue. I cannot imagine, nor would I try to, a more egregious example than that which passes for representative government that systematically evades the moral responsibility to prosecute rapists in the name of multiculturalism.
It is this disheartening dialog which is the destructive machinery that compel the good to do nothing in the face of evil. Nations must do their jobs. The good must face and root out evil. There is more than enough work to go around.
