What any five-year-old would know was murder

[I wrote this in September of 2015, but didn't find a publisher.  - emc]

The recent videos of Planned Parenthood officials behaving abominably has drawn out an abominably bad argument in Planned Parenthood’s defense.  The argument is that the sale of fetal organs is justified because the organs would only go to waste if Planned Parenthood didn’t sell them, and that the money raised by selling them is used for good purposes.  Now, if one were to take any of the bodies that are big enough to harvest useful organs from and lay it on a table it would be a recognizable human being – not a mere clump of cells, but a baby – with human arms and legs and a human face.  Seeing it would make most other human beings, even most liberals, uncomfortable and sad in the way that seeing any dead child makes any decent person feel uncomfortable and sad.  A five-year-old would recognize it as a person.

Generally, we do not think of dead human beings as scrap material, or as slabs of meat.  We grant them a kind of instinctive reverence – an acknowledgment of the fact that what we see in front of us was once the dwelling place of feelings and a mind like our own, however inexperienced or unknowable.  In other words, we see in a dead human body a reflection of ourselves.  We would not think of our own bodies as something to be chopped up so they could be put to some better purpose than we could achieve by our own lives.  We might be willing to donate our organs for others to use after our deaths – but that is a moral choice we are allowed to make as grown-up human beings.  That is a choice.  We would not want someone else to decide our organs mattered – but that we did not.  We have a certain inner sense that our own lives are sacred, and, if we open our hearts, we know that other peoples lives, no matter how humble or how small, are sacred too.  Our society has a new phrase to express this inner understanding.  In the language of the left, the supreme court, and many well-educated people, this form of compassion is simply known as religious bigotry.  It is our fate to live in such a modern and enlightened age.

The argument Planned Parenthood’s advocates make is much the same as Josef Mengele might have made for performing unspeakable experiments on child prisoners in Auschwitz.  The children were going to die anyway, so why let their little bodies go to waste?  The answer, in both cases, is that the crime began not with an act, but with an idea.  The idea is that a few helpless lives, more-or-less, are unimportant.  That certain people can be arbitrarily declared not persons.  Normal, reasonable practices don’t get built on a foundation of the execution of the innocent.  When a society pretends that a certain kind of murder ought to be engaged in for the greater good, when it de-values the lives of the innocent and helpless, its moral pretensions become an empty joke.  It sticks a knife into the very concept of morality.

At the mere mention of the Holocaust, I imagine the proponents of Planned Parenthood will roll their eyes and accuse me of inflammatory name calling.  I stand by the comparison.  Find another instance of the taking of human life in such a cold, systematic, institutional way.  Legalized abortion is not the unfortunate random bloodletting of war, but a cool, planned, careful implementation of someone’s idea of what is best for society.  It is not merely killing, but premeditated, intellectualized murder.

Nor is the similarity between the Holocaust and Planned Parenthood’s actions a mere coincidence.  Both the Holocaust and Planned Parenthood have their origins in the same eugenics movement of the early twentieth century.  Eugenics, simply put, was the idea that, by the selective breeding of good human specimens on the one hand, and the prevention of breeding by inferior human specimens on the other, the human race might be perfected.  We all know that Adolf Hitler carried this idea to its gruesome conclusion.  Fewer know that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, followed the same idea to a similar conclusion.  Both believed that, to make a better society, some blameless lives would have to be thrown out like so much garbage.  While legal abortion is no longer usually practiced for the misguided purpose of building a better race at any cost, it is still in every way the bloody legacy of that idea.  An idea which, in the case of the Holocaust, cost 13 million people their lives.  Abortions – in the United States alone – exceeded that death toll decades ago.

What the film makers from the Center for Medical Progress has done in its Planned Parenthood videos is little different from what US Army photographers did at Buchenwald and Dachau.  They have simply exposed reality to the light of day.  In neither case was any embellishment necessary.  The only thing surprising is our own surprise.  Did we expect that people who earn their wages by dismembering living human beings would somehow do that ghoulish work with loving compassion and respect?  Were the people who ran Dachau a kind and gentle species of men?  When a person deals, year in and year out, in human butchery and the callous sale of body parts – can he or she retain some moral compass worth the term?  We have only seen what has really always been there, hidden discreetly behind dignified walls.  We have only seen what we should have expected.  What any normal five-year-old would know was murder.

If we can tolerate such things and do nothing we are as guilty as the Germans were.  Or rather we are worse, because at least the Germans could claim they didn’t know, or didn’t know the details, of what was happening around them.  You and I have known all along.  I myself have driven past Right-to-Life demonstrations with their terrible grizzly signs and did nothing but shake my head and wish that they would take their awful images away.  I have quietly accepted this ongoing atrocity as the perverse expression of a civil right, and left it go unnoticed and unconsidered – out of sight and out of mind.  Who am I to condemn the girl or young woman who, desperate and confused, accepts the lies and evil advice of calm, credentialed people in white coats?  We have all been lied to, and most of us have lied to ourselves.  What appears obscene and wrong at first – almost always truly is.  The price of that kind of error, sadly, is often paid in innocent blood.

The war we lack the will to fight

America has developed an unrealistic aversion to losing soldiers.  I do not mean to undervalue, in any way, the people on whom our freedom ultimately depends.  I am saying that, as a nation, we’ve forgotten what a real war is.  On an average day in World War II, America suffered the deaths of 302 combatants.  Not on D-Day or during the battle of Iwo Jima, but on an average day during the conflict.  The current general conflict with Islamic fundamentalism has cost the US about 1.5 combatants on an average day.  If you consider the difference between these two wars on a per capita basis, the ratio is not 200-to-1, but closer to 500-to-1 – since we now have more than double the population.  Nevertheless, the comparatively tiny number of deaths in the current conflict (along with a somewhat more substantial number of wounded) has left America fatigued and gun-shy.  Even conservatives complain bitterly about any hint of “more American boots on the ground.”

We are also much more sensitive to enemy civilian deaths than we were during World War II.  The number of civilian dead the US is responsible for is hard to determine for a variety of reasons, but the qualitative policy differences are plain.  During World War II we heavily bombed both German and Japanese cities with very little political backlash.  Now, we hear public outcries at the occasional smart-bomb that finds its way – quite accidentally – onto a group of non-combatants.  We bomb ISIS oil trucks with reluctance because they might be driven by civilians.

The origins of these changes in the public tolerance for bloodletting would be interesting to examine, but for my purpose it is enough to simply understand that these changes have occurred.  Together, these two essentially sociological factors have forced us to fight our wars the way we do – using tactical air power almost to the exclusion of other means.

Bombing a technologically inferior enemy from sophisticated tactical aircraft has to be one of the safest forms of warfare ever devised.  Drone attacks are even safer.  Though the financial costs of these methods are spectacular, the personnel losses are minimal.  Likewise, compared to the mass, unguided bombing campaigns in World War II, modern tactical bombing kills a minimum of enemy civilians.  The “bad-guy-to-bystander” ratio is quite high, the obvious trade-off being, again, the astronomical cost of smart munitions.  A variable imbedded in the equation is the use of special forces teams to locate targets for the planes.  More teams = more dead soldiers (on both sides).  Fewer teams = more dead bystanders (and lower overall effectiveness).  The overriding consideration in employing air power this way is not the age-old goal of military victory, but the goal of avoiding incidents that journalists might publicize as atrocities.  War, the planners imagine, can be conducted without the mess.  The lives that are wasted through the unnecessary prolongation of the fighting do not seem to bother journalists or politicians as much as individually bloody events.  Their concern is about today’s news cycle, not the retrospective view of history.

Unfortunately, our enemies are rarely either as stupid or as sensitive as our politicians or our press corps.  The experienced jihadist knows perfectly well that the safest place to deploy a rocket launcher is in a populated area – preferably next to a school.  Hamas has used the heightened sensitivities of the western world against Israel and ISIS uses them against us.  Moreover, our enemies also know that the second-tier anti-aircraft weapons they are stuck with don’t have much chance of downing American aircraft.  Unable to fight American soldiers or shoot down American planes, terrorism against our population is the only option left.  It seems to be their preferred option in any case.  I am sure that whatever fraction of our officer corps that has eluded political castration knows all of this and more.  I am equally certain that the progressive politicians now in power consider professional officers untrustworthy and think of warfare as a dirty subject – unworthy of study by sophisticated people like themselves.  We have only to look at the Obama administration’s prisoner exchange policies, their unjustified faith in their own diplomatic effectiveness, and their penchant for releasing militarily significant information to the press, to see their cold contempt for military considerations.  Making war has always been a tragic, wretched business – but many contemporary politicians seem to think the new millennium has somehow made warfare an entirely optional undertaking.  It is not.

No amount of air power is capable of occupying even enough land for the skinniest of diplomats to stand on.  Aircraft, broadly speaking, can only perform two operations.  They can find potential targets and they can destroy them.  The cannot search houses or occupy streets.  The continual call, from presidential candidates of both of our political parties, for a gaggle of Arab allies to do the dirty work of dying for American national interests is a frank admission of our national impotence.  From a foreign policy perspective, it is also desperately shortsighted.  The people that do the dying have an understandable expectation of getting victory on their terms.  Their aspirations and ours are not the same.  Even with our ground troops present, neither Afghanistan nor Iraq showed much interest in rebuilding themselves as modern, democratic, western nations.  Culture has never been that conveniently malleable.  Afghanistan and Iraq are the same tribal, corrupt, politically and morally backward places they have been for centuries.  Eliminating ISIS with a group of proxies will not put an end to Wahhabism, but will merely disturb its focus temporarily.  History has let the caliphate out of the bag, and the destruction of one provisional Islamist state is not going to put it back again.  Unless we are driven to the level of public outrage necessary to either occupy the entire Muslim world or reduce it to a depopulated smoking ruin, the jihadists will continue to rise from their own ashes with a new name and the same old 7^th century objective.  Campaign rhetoric is unlikely to arouse that kind of public will.

Donald Trump, to be fair, has a different bad plan from all the others.  He wants to “take the oil.”  There is no way to do this without a massive ground operation.  One cannot exactly fly off with the oil in a special forces helicopter.  “Taking the oil” would mean permanently occupying not only the oil fields themselves, but also enough secure territory to run a pipeline to the closest defensible port – without any pretense of ever leaving.  The “Trump pipeline” would indeed rob the enemy of considerable wealth, at the cost of a slow trickle of dead American soldiers for a very long time.  It is militarily possible but politically unthinkable.

Despite what you might think, I am not a defeatist.  I believe that war and air power have a valid role, it just doesn’t happen to be the role of playing king-maker between competing tribal nations.  It is not a good thing when one tribe of barbarians butchers another, but we have neither the public will nor the responsibility to stop them.  The role of the American military ought to be the protection of the United States.  In our time that should probably include the suppression of nuclear weapons programs in hostile nations, and hard but measured retaliation against the known state supporters of terrorist acts.  It should not concern itself with maintaining familiar borders on middle eastern maps.  In a sane world, nations that chant “death to America” or hold our citizens for ransom ought to be considered enemies.  If they declare themselves at war with us – we ought to take them at their word.  They should be punished – they should not be managed.  If tactical air power is the only tool the public will let our military use, we should at least employ it effectively – more against nuclear facilities and valuable enemy assets, and less against illiterate fanatics with Kalashnikovs. 

While we must react forcefully in the international sphere to re-establish our credibility, the larger problem of terrorism cannot be solved with high explosives or American troops on foreign soil.  The idea of Jihad is simply too widespread.  The greatest supporters of terrorism against the US are not Saudi princes or the Islamic Republic of Iran, but the weepy, hand-wringing advocates of open borders and multiculturalism.  Neither the 9/11 bombers, Major Hasan, the Tsarnaev brothers, nor the San Bernardino shooters lived in places one could use a Hellfire missile against.  Through the power of self-destructive immigration policies – they all lived right here.  That is where our present focus should be.

How progressives murdered Bat Boy

Originally Published by American Thinker

For those of you who are very young, or who have spent your days so glued to your cellphones that you haven’t noticed the trashy newspapers in supermarket checkout lanes, Bat Boy was a monster – half boy and half bat – the creation of the Weekly World News.  Bat Boy was supposed to have been discovered in a West Virginia cave in 1992.  He was two feet tall at the time of his discovery, but grew – as most kids do.  He did all sorts of interesting things, including fighting terrorism with the Army on some occasions.  He had what might be described as a love-hate relationship with the US government.  A perceptive boy if ever there was one.

The institution of the supermarket tabloid goes back as far as I can personally remember.  In the 1970’s their pages were about evenly populated with fictitious monsters, UFO sightings, the wild discoveries of Soviet scientists, and assorted celebrity gossip.  Stuck in line with your mom and the groceries, you couldn’t help but look.  Sensible people never took the pre-Photoshop creations of these vulgar newspapers very seriously, but they have always had a certain appeal to the high school sophomore that lives on quietly in most of us.  When I was young, whether a kid’s family actually bought the National Inquirer amounted to a kind of rough IQ test.  If they not only bought it but actually believed it, one could assume they were not exactly overachievers.

If you are thinking I am going to tell you how Bill and Hillary kidnapped Bat Boy, and how he subsequently died during salacious activities on Jeffrey Epstein’s “orgy island,” I will have to disappoint you.  Bat Boy died a more humdrum, more pedestrian death.  He was simply upstaged by the increasing circus-like condition of the real world.  The Clintons were accessories to the crime of course, but Bat Boy’s murder was committed by progressives and their culture en masse – and, as usual, no indictment has ever been filed.

Even at the time of Bat Boy’s discovery, Michael Jackson was well on the way supplanting him in the tabloid press.  Fake freaks do not compete well against real ones.  Bat Boy’s pointy ears and pointy teeth were no match for Jackson’s pointy nose and hideously angular face.  Simply escaping from one captor after another didn’t compare with the sensationalism of Jackson’s real life.  When faced with a half-black, half-white celebrity pedophile wearing a single white glove, what’s a half-boy, half-bat to do?  Run like a bat out of hell?  This, I think, is why Bat Boy abandoned his life of minor crime, turned over a new leaf, and pursued a life of national service.  Being a good conservative Appalachian kid at heart, he believed that America would warm to a military hero more than it would indulge its baser curiosities about a freak.  Unfortunately for Bat Boy, and for ourselves, times and sensibilities had changed.  No amount of heroism could halt his inevitable demise.

The Weekly World News stopped printing physical papers in 2007, following their readers into the netherworld of cyberspace a couple of years later.  Bat Boy faded away, his final resting place unknown.  Bat Boy’s less patriotic successor is the equally bizarre but sadly less fictitious monster, “Caitlyn” Jenner.  “Caitlyn,” we all know, is half-man and half-woman.  “She” was popularized on another well-known supermarket magazine, Vanity Fair.  Jenner, then named Bruce, was also a feature of my childhood grocery memories – appearing on Wheaties cereal boxes as the greatest of America’s Olympic heroes.  The 66-year-old self-made hermaphrodite is still a hero to some, winning the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.  I know you already know these things.  The problem is not that “you cannot make these things up”.  The problem is that you no longer have to.

Pretty soon, if we don’t change the culture’s direction, all forms of satire from the crudest to the most refined will follow the late Bat Boy into the abyss.  As people have begun to turn their cellphone cameras on themselves the job of freak has far more applicants than available positions.  Freakishness used to be something I could pick up or leave in the rack like a pack of chewing gum.  Now I live in a thoroughly freakish world.  Open YouTube and click the “Trending” button if you feel my assessment has been unduly harsh.  The shrinking list of traditional tabloids must struggle to think of anything shocking left to print.  They are now overwhelmingly populated with pictures of celebrities turned fat and ugly – something to make supermarket customers feel a little less bad about the eight packages of Oreos and two gallons of ice cream nestled in their carts.  If you cannot entertain the public with the bizarre, a bit of schadenfreude will have to do.  At the bitter end, if the trend continues, perhaps the tabloids will start showing normal people on their covers.  People with any sort of lasting standards are rapidly becoming the monsters of tomorrow.

The Academic War on Facts

Originally Published by American Thinker

When I was in college back in the 1980s, a couple of new degree programs, Women’s Studies and Afro-American Studies, were starting to gain in popularity.  The purpose of these programs, everyone knew perfectly well, was to advance the cause of political activism for these two demographic groups.  Activism isn’t necessarily a bad thing.  Without a doubt, there really had been barriers to women’s advancement, more social than legal, but by the 1980s these were clearly fading – more as the result of the huge number of women advancing themselves than as the result of the efforts of radical feminists.  Similarly, there had also been genuinely oppressive Jim Crow laws constraining black Americans, but those laws had been almost entirely knocked down in the 1950s and 60s.  America of the 1980s was not a perfectly gender-blind or color-blind society, but we were clearly on the right track.  True sexism and racism were well on the decline.  But along with the real progress there came a class of professional progressive activists.  Their more courageous predecessors having all but won the war, this new generation of reformers established permanent institutions in academia to re-fight it.  Never mind the notable lack of sexist or racist stalwarts in authority to oppose.  If an activist runs out of enemies, it is no great challenge to reinvent them.

An institution of reform has the same core priority as any other institution.  That priority is to survive and grow.  Institutions provide good jobs for the people who make the decisions, promote the cause, and shuffle the paper.  I have often suspected that if a scientist arrived in the lobby of the American Cancer Society with a cure for all forms of cancer, the managing director’s first impulse would be to jump for joy – but a moment’s reflection would reveal the need to take the wretched troublemaker to the basement and beat him to death.  What’s the American Cancer Society without Cancer?  And what’s an activist without a cause?

Not wanting to be called either racist or sexist (the postmodernist equivalent to being accused of witchcraft) university administrations were not inclined to hold their new activist programs to any sort of standards.  Whatever inflammatory theories emerged from them might have been greeted with an inward cringe – but this absolutely had to be accompanied with an outward nod of approval.  The phrases “moral courage” and “university administration” rarely come together in a single sentence.

One of the early products of this new activism was the feminist Susan Brownmiller’s concept of a culture of rape.  In Brownmiller’s view, rape is not primarily a crime of an unrestrained sexual impulse, but is instead an assertion of power.  It is not the personal violation of one individual by another, but is instead a political act – an expression of all men’s collective desire to oppress all women.  This strange idea annoyed me from the start.  To begin with, I had never been invited to the secret meeting in which all of the planet’s men had voted to embark on such a brutish plan.  More to the point, it was simply counter to the obvious facts.  Real rapists are morally deficient, either for uniquely individual reasons, or because they are members of some nameable degenerate or barbaric culture.  The barbaric culture that is currently overrunning Europe leaps to mind.  Does any sane person really think that what is going through a rapist’s mind is: “I feel an overwhelming urge to assert collective male dominance over women”?  Decent men are quite resentful at being lumped into the collective “men” so that they can be held jointly accountable with genuine predators with whom they have little in common, and over whom they have no control.  But preposterous ideas like this one suite the activist’s purposes.  Brownmiller’s theory has two characteristics we have now seen repeated as a kind of formula.  First, any critique of the theory brands you as part of the problem – a unfeeling and reactionary troglodyte whose views only offer proof of the theory’s correctness.  Second, the theory singles out no actionable causes, but simply drives an ugly wedge between two, largely artificial, classes.  True, there really were men and women in 1975 when Brownmiller published her book (now, even the basic division of humanity into two simple genders is considered oppression) – but there never was a polity of “all men” as distinct from a polity of “all women.”  Whether Brownmiller or some more straightforwardly political radical like Alinsky made this blueprint is a matter of academic interest – if you’ll forgive the play on words.  Either way, the pattern was set.

Academia has a special place in society as one of very few institutions expected to define and promulgate truth.  The more secular a society becomes, the more academia holds that power alone.  That is why the decline in standards of evidence within any branch of academia is so damaging.  Politics has always been the domain of liars and demagogues.  It has been the twin bulwarks of religious moral principle and hard, substantiated facts that have held politics in check in modern times.  We now live in a society where truths are no longer buttressed by either.  If tenured professors are not interested in facts, we should not be too surprised that no one else is.  Contemporary academic standards are not those of the hard sciences.  Instead, they are the soft standards of liberal arts – not of physics and chemistry, but of literature and narrative.  The question is no longer “Is it true?,” but “Does it make a compelling story?”  “Does it stir the audience’s feelings?”  “Does it have clear-cut heroes and clear-cut villains?”  This shift explains not only the weird synthesis of news with entertainment, but the equally bizarre prevalence of celebrity activism.  Why would anyone, thinking rationally, care what a sadism-obsessed deviant like Quentin Tarantino has to say about political or social issues?  People care because we live in a society without rational standards.  We do not have “credible authorities” – we only have “opinion makers.”

The government we are currently saddled with is saturated with officials from my generation.  We were taught, however subtly, that the standards of truth to which people should be held accountable depend on who they are and what they happen to be saying.  The grievances of minority groups, for example, can simply not be questioned.  The grievances of non-minority groups (white southerners are a perennial favorite) can be immediately reviled and dismissed.  Racism is back with a vengeance – the difference is that now you will be called racist if you attempt to point it out.  Relevant objective facts, like the prevalence of black-on-black crime, are excluded from consideration.  Politically acceptable “truth” isn’t to be found in facts, but simply in the recitation of the narrative.

If the current state of things is terrible, the possibilities for the future are nearly unimaginable.  What would happen if the self-indulgent, sexually ambiguous thumb-suckers that inhabit university safe-spaces today, demanding trigger warnings so that their hypersensitive feeling aren’t scratched by anything factual, find their way into positions of real authority?  These monsters scare even the liberal Professor Frankensteins who created them. Mercifully, we may never know what a world run by student cry-bullies would be like – but only because it will either collapse or change before they manage to ascend to the throne.  In times of real scarcity, the people who put up the front money for university educations (parents, banks, or the Federal government) will figure out that investing money merely to produce unproductive narcissists is not only unprofitable, but redundant work.  Even the worst middle school in the poorest inner-city ghetto can make losers out of any human raw material provided, bad or good.  Indeed, contemporary culture probably produces losers without any educational assistance at all.  Even now, the actual demand for educationally-induced political activism is minuscule.  One elite school was all we needed to produce the narcissistic loser that occupies the White House now – and one of him has been quite enough to nearly bring the country to its knees.

It has come to this

Originally Published by American Thinker

[Author's note. This is the original version of my article, and differs slightly from the text published in AT.  I am, frankly, astonished at how well this article was received and how widely it has been distributed. I seem to have hit a nerve. To address a few points I have seen in comments elsewhere:
1. Yes, it is perfectly possible I have underestimated Trump.
2. My support for Cruz is contingent on him getting within the margin of error of a tie.
3. Yes, electing a strongman is indeed a dangerous thing. And the alternative is not?
4. To persons making the common progressive counterarguments (Whaaa, boo hoo, etc.): I wish you luck! Graduating from the 7th grade will be quite a challenge -- but I know that you can do it!
5. To those who have praised the article in various ways: You have my heartfelt thanks. You give me courage and renew my hope.                -emc  ]

The United States of America that we grew up in, and in some cases fought for it – no longer exists.  I would like to write something stirring in defense of our Constitution, but it isn’t under attack.  It is simply ignored.  Some have proposed that we have a Constitutional convention to add new amendments.  What would that accomplish?  Would our present Federal government respect a set of new amendments when they don’t respect the old ones?  What good does it do to insist on one’s rights as a citizen, when in fact mere citizenship has lost its meaning?  Americans have no rights officials in Washington feel bound to recognize.  Both Republicans and Democrats overrule majority opinion as a matter of course.  They do not doubt for a moment that they are the best and brightest, and that our voting franchise is merely an antiquated inconvenience.  My elected representatives represent no one but themselves.  They make war on my culture, my faith, and my security – then they insult me in front of the elitist media on TV.  The executive branch, the congress, and most of the judiciary have no more respect for me as a human being than the government of the British Empire had for the most backward and primitive of its subjects.  The elites that live inside the beltway and in the bubble of academia should try living in Ohio or Missouri for a few years.  “White privilege” isn’t doing all that well in rural West Virginia.  We are here, now, in this country at this time.  We are real people with real lives.  We are not statistics in a sociologist’s model, nor are we third and fourth generation perpetrators from some politically reconstituted version of history.  It is all too obvious that our most unrepresentative of representative governments neither knows us nor respects us.  They despise us.  It is too much to ask us not to despise them in return.

I am tired of being told by Barack Obama on the one hand, and Bill O’Reilly on the other, what my American values are or ought to be.  I can work those out for myself.  I am tired of living in the dumping ground for whatever group of hostile immigrants the social engineers in Washington import to ease their guilty consciences.  Let them move their Mexican underclass and angry Syrian colonists to Martha’s Vineyard or Marin County north of San Francisco.  Maybe this would help our legislators and “opinion makers” alleviate a bit of their never-ending narcissistic angst.  I am tired of nameless, self-righteous bureaucrats levering open the restrooms of my local schools to the confused transvestites that a liberal education churns out, then lecturing me about tolerance and individual rights.  Where is their tolerance of my culture?  Where is their respect for my rights?  Where is the brotherly concern shown to my neighbors?  I am tired of living in an ill-planned social experiment.  Of taboo words and taboo ideas.  I am tired of being called a racist by people who are, themselves, the worst of racists – and who have denuded the word itself of any meaning.

To be quite honest, I have no particular love for Donald Trump – but he is what we have.  He doesn’t speak well.  I don’t think he has any idea what a republic is.  Then again, his last two predecessors didn’t really understand the concept of a republic either.  No doubt it’s not a word they use at Harvard.  Although I may not especially like the erratic, often juvenile Mr. Trump, it isn’t lost on me that he at least doesn’t hold me in contempt.  He may make war on illegal immigration and Muslim fundamentalism, but most of the alternatives are making war on me.  Twenty years ago I would have worried about a man who scares resident aliens, and even a few citizens, to death.  You will forgive me if I have come to the epiphany that protecting absolutely every minority’s feelings is not a rational government’s primary purpose.  You will forgive me, too, if I stop ignoring fourteen centuries of Islamic history, the stark brutality of Islamic scripture, and the barbarism of contemporary Islamic states.  Give me a gated, crime-free  community to live in, and maybe I can have the luxury of worrying about the planet’s weather.

I would prefer to have a genuine conservative candidate to vote for, and will probably vote for Cruz if he looks viable enough.  But if Donald Trump is what it has come to – I will happily take the risk and check the box next to his name.  Republican, independent, or Bull Moose party – I could not care less.  Conservatives don’t have a party.  We cannot be choosy.  Better Trump than the Democrat’s mad rush to national harikari.  And better Trump than the Republican establishment’s facilitation of the same national harikari, plus the now intolerable old lie that “it’s the best that we could do.”  It has never been impossible to build 700 miles of security fence.  Eisenhower built most of the interstate highway system in under a decade.  It has never been impossible to balance the budget.  Over the course of American history balanced budgets have actually been the norm.  Moral cowardice has never been an attractive trait, and no amount of clever advertising really makes it so.  Ivy leaguers like Hillary who fail, then get congratulated for their failures by the ivy league talking heads, do not impress me more than Trump.  Frankly, George W. Bush set the bar pretty low for ivy leaguers and Barack Obama took the bar down altogether.  It is sad to say that Trump would not be our first celebrity president.  Yet for all of his ratings appeal and flamboyance, he did at least accomplish something in his lifetime other than being popular and being famous.  He is, at least, a competent businessman.  That’s better than having such credentials as “I made a great speech at the ‘04 convention,” or “I married Bill Clinton,” or, the perennial favorite, “I waited my turn.”

We have nearly died of the disease of too much compromise.  Of “reaching across the aisle.”  Of “building a coalition of our Muslim allies.”  We have no real friends in either quarter.  How can a free people compromise with totalitarian ideologies, either socialist or Islamic?  Let’s not fool ourselves.  America has bitter enemies – both foreign and domestic.  Donald Trump, for all of his flaws, must do.  He speaks his mind.  He understands and acknowledges at least the plainly obvious.  Most of all, so far, he doesn’t scare.

By grace alone

As a child I felt the power that imbued all things
(I did not know your name
                but felt your breath in the March wind
Smelled and saw and knew you in the rotation of the seasons
In the crisp light of the stars
                and in eerie light of fireflies
In the clatter of dry leaves
                and in the cool
                                soft
                                                silence of the snow
                )
Everywhere
In all things
Illuminating to me in the magical intensity of sundown
High cloud spread across heaven
                and insect singing down below
All alive
From the moon
                to the smallest young green leaf
                (When was it that I lost you
                and forgot?
                                )

When was it I that I lost that light within me
Trading it for a mixture
                of intractable hungers
                and withered
                                shrunken facts?
                (When I began to think myself the center of the universe
                                and ceased to breathe?
                                (When I became an island
                                                in a cold sea far from home)
                                                ).

Into that darkness I have gone unknowingly and quietly
With the approval of my peers
(but I have gone nonetheless)
Little by little
                in the way that all things freeze in your absence
                                (I have lived the long decades as a fitful corpse
                                lost in my dark thoughts
                                gnawed by demons seen and unseen
                                                (I have moved restlessly
                                                and stood still restlessly
                                eaten and slept and dreamed restlessly

A thoughtless animal on the fringes of a thoughtless herd
                arrogant
                                insufferable
                )
                (As they have groaned
                I have groaned

                As they have feared and shivered and despised
                I too have feared
                                and shivered
                                                and despised
                )
I have been as nothing
                as a hungry mole among the roots of giant trees
                consuming the days I could not see
                and as certainly consumed by them
                )
                .

For this is the fallen world in all of its spectacle
The world of art
The world of haughty institutions
                (Dead are the minds that murder with ideas and words
                Dead are the tongues that lust for recognition
                                Here the murderer
                                and there the murder’s handiwork
                                                Here the liar
                                                and there the lie

                                We call it social progress
                                                (It is death)

                                We call it wisdom
                                                (It is death)
                                                ).

Here the years have rotted
There the days
                thrown onto the age-old heap of vanities and hatreds
(
Have you not been with me all along
Following in silence like my shadow
Waiting
                watching
                                whispering?
                (When in fact you are the Man
                and I the shadow
                                You are the light
                                and I the darkness
                                                I the illusion
                                                and you the truth
                                                )).

Have I not called out to you from the very bottom of my fears
(in the worst of my moments
                with the most abject of prayers

                only to be lifted up on unseen hands
                                which I then
                                                in turn
                                                                denied
                                                )?

Here
Blown in to this corner of a disinterested world
My heart still beating desperately
                wanting to live
Superficially sufficient
                but a nervous
                                hollow shell
                (
                Here you have bought and paid for my remains
                                stood me up
                                                on wavering legs
                                uncertain
                                                with a flickering new sight
                                dimly seeing what I have always seen
                                                and never seen
                                                (what I have long despised

                                                                and always loved)
                                                ).

How can I ask for anything at all of my accord?
                (I bend as a willow in the wind
                You beat me with storms
                                and suffuse me with light

                I am enough as I am
                                in all my weakness
                (I have asked enough
                for I am no more than dust
                )

Are you not the eye that sees into my inmost self?
Am I not as you have made me
All that is wretched and all that is good
All that strives
                and all that fears?
(Do not the seasons spin around me
                day in
                                and day out
                While I watch and feel and breathe

                My heart open
                My debts
                                made good
                ?)
                )

Do I not praise you as all dust must praise the rain
(From its nature
                from its smallness
                                as a child
                reaches up impossibly toward the sky
                ?)

How can God condemn good people?

Two friends of mine have, quite independently, made the same argument against a strict scriptural understanding of Christianity. Both asked essentially this:

How can a loving, merciful God condemn non-believing but good people to eternal torment in hell?

To begin with, the question itself contains two assumptions that are worth noting. First, it assumes that scripture actually says that God condemns non-believers of all sorts to everlasting punishment. A great deal of effort has been put into humanizing scripture with new interpretations, but we will put that problem aside. I believe scripture does support quite widespread condemnation, and if a person confidently believed that scripture says otherwise that person really wouldn’t be worried about this issue in the first place.

The second and more revealing assumption the question makes is that there is a standard of goodness over and above God’s purposes, to which we can fairly expect God to conform. In other words, the question takes for granted that it is our notions of goodness and justice that the universe really should obey, and that God should be a sort of divine executive authority, whose purpose is to manipulate the universe so that it conforms to our ideals. Whether God exists or not, that is obviously not the universe we’re living in. Is cancer just by human standards? Are earthquakes?  More to the point, any interpretation of the Holy scriptures that involves actually reading them will show that it is not God who is here to serve our purposes – but we who are here to serve God’s. To even ask the question is more than to overlook some minor aspect of Christianity – it is to admit to an utter ignorance of who and what the scripture says God is. Atheists have long smugly assumed that man invented God, and to the extent that men have been willing to reinterpret (or abridge) the Holy scriptures to justify their own desires the atheists have been quite right. An average Christian of a hundred years ago would probably not have doubted the fate that waits for non-believers after death – but then their ultimate religious authority was the scriptures themselves. Our current standard is all too often the popular culture. Sadly, this is even frequently true of those who have authority over churches. Where, in scripture, does it say that the duty of God is to follow the standards of the secular society?

The God of the Bible is not without mercy – but he is not a grand entitlement administrator in the sky. He has expectations of us. Christ himself was quite straightforward about the conditions of salvation:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave his only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through Him. Whoever believes in Him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.” John 3:16-18

In other words, we are saved by our faith that Jesus Christ suffered death in our place. He rose again that we might also rise. When we begin to think that Hindus and atheists, who lack this faith, might also go to heaven so long as they are “good people,” we only show ourselves to be either ignorant of scripture – or willing to twist it into whatever platitudes happen to suit our feelings.

God the father’s ultimate purposes are not easy to comprehend (they are perhaps not comprehensible at all) but he is not without consistency. Throughout the Old Testament he shows himself quite willing to condemn whole nations of non-believers in the course of his plans. To “save the world” does not appear, in God’s eyes, to necessarily mean saving the majority of the individuals. Nor does God’s position toward those who fall short of his purposes alter fundamentally in the New Testament:

“Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Matthew 7:13-14

The salvation offered by Christ is not a giveaway to all but the most repugnant. If almost everyone, including non-believers, were to be saved then what would be the point of even teaching the Gospel?  What difference would it make?  While our sins were indeed paid for by Christ’s suffering, this gift of forgiveness and eternal life is received only through faith in Him.  Any other interpretation renders the text incoherent.

No one likes to think of good people being condemned, especially the people that we know and love. But we don’t get to vote on God’s purposes or his judgements. Those that we recognize as “good” people are usually those who are friendly to us or to whom we have some personal attachment. To be “good” in God’s eyes is to strive to obey his commandments – including the commandment which acknowledges his sovereignty. If the scriptures are understood courageously and honestly, God must be recognized an awesome and terrible being – a jealous God, wrathful on the one hand, but merciful and gracious on the other:

“The Lord is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.

He will not always chide, nor will he keep his anger forever.

He does not deal with us according to our sins, nor repay us according to our iniquities.

For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his steadfast love toward those who fear him;

as far as the east is from the west, so far does he remove our transgressions from us.

As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.

For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.”

Psalm 103:8-14

But one must note here – “the Lord shows compassion to those who fear him.” He is merciful to those who believe.

While on Earth, there is much that we can do to help the non-believer. We are not, for the most part, called to be the instruments of God’s wrath. Scripture exhorts us to love our neighbor – repentant and unrepentant alike. That, and loving God, are the tasks set firmly and plainly before us in the Holy scriptures. Who are we to second guess God’s judgements?

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” Isaiah 55:8-9