To my parents. Easter 2009
Sunday, April 12th, 2009As this Easter dawns, the sun will have first passed over American soldiers fighting terrorists in a foreign land, and over an American ship held by pirates. These are the same problems at America’s founding, when a young nation first struggled to make its way in the world.
Terrorism, cultural vandalism, and resurgent piracy depend on civilization’s weakness, exploiting the civilized part of civilization itself. They thrive on our reluctance to face hard facts, and our inability to perform hard tasks.
What happens when the highest value of in a civilization is to feel good about yourself? One of the reasons working through “proxies”, using rendition, or manipulating affairs through “engagement” is so psychologically attractive is that it is largely possible to pay others to do the dirty work. Just as tradesmen are paid to unclog sewers, butcher the meat and do the sweaty farming out of sight, we’d just rather pay someone at the UN or Somalia to do something which might stain our self-image. Who was it who said that if the safety of Washington DC were at stake they hoped someone would “do what was necessary” to get the information as long as he never told anybody. Take the risks, son. Do it for us. But have the decency never to mention it. The police and military become some kind of garbage collectors who are told specifically to stay unseen while the polite world sleeps.
The one advantage — or curse — that the World War II generation had was that they could not pretend to innocence. They had nuked Japan. They had destroyed the Nazi Armies. They flattened cities. But they bequeathed innocence to their children. That was their most precious legacy. When you asked them about the war, they told you only the good bits and laughed about the rest. Laughed so that we didn’t have to know.
One of the real moral dilemmas that the Boomers and Generations X and Y had to resolve was how to stay alive alive in a world where the struggle for survival has not yet been abolished. One way was to pretend they were outside the food chain. The other was to conceal the food chain through a series of abstractions. People think it’s fun to be a revolutionary fighting some Third World tyrant for as long as they’re not reminded of the occasional necessity to slit a police informer’s throat.
I have this theory that there are, as a general rule, no atheists in foxholes because people in those situations are very much of aware of things as they are, not as they are imagined to be. Of the need for forgiveness. Of the uncertainty of life. And the hope for salvation. It’s Good Friday in a world that desperately wants to forget that it ever happened. The problem is that if you forget the Good Friday, you forget Easter too. —Richard Fernandez, Belmont Club
As we squint into the brilliance of the future, we hope it is a sunrise; not sunset. Civilization requires infrastructure, both material and cultural. Sometimes that glorious sunrise is a glare obscuring the gun-sights, and sometimes it is the blaze from an enemy weapon. Hard choices have to be made, and tough, dirty work has to be done.
Thanks to my parents —indeed to their generation— for the work and sacrifice they made to support our nation. In turn, it is our responsibility to maintain our culture’s foundation. As Fernandez says, there was sacrifice before resurrection.
In His image.
Congratulations to Congresscritturs Cantor, Forbes, and Goodlatte on their votes for everyday Virginians and against letting our national forests get trashed. Of course the leftist hypocrites presented this vote in the opposite light, it’s a hallmark of partisan politics.