For thirty years we have fought self-destructive wars against countries with which we should have been pursuing partnerships, including both Iraq and Russia.
Now finally we have an opportunity to decapitate our most implacable foe, even as it is on the cusp of acquiring nuclear weapons, and it looks like we may not take it.
What’s worse, the reason we appear to be fumbling this opportunity is the political power of an anti-American fifth column pressuring the Biden Administration to abandon Israel.
I use the term anti-American advisedly because to be anti-Israel is now to be anti-American. We are in the midst of a global culture war between the achievers and the destroyers, the producers and the wasters, the providers and the moochers. Israel is exemplary of the good guys, the Gazans and the mullahs the bad guys.
Evil, as St Augustine argued, is an incompleteness, defect or one might even say shortage of being. God, as St Thomas would explain, is the being whose essence is existence itself. “I am Who am” the very source of all other being. He created the world and He called it good.
We are invited by Him to participate as co-creators in His making of good things, not as He does, creating from nothing, but in using what He has made to bring peace and abundance to a world in which both are threatened by sin.
Murder is a sin, but so are sloth and envy and greed and gluttony and lust and pride and wrath. All are flights from being, seeking to undermine our mission of co-creation. Envy would prefer another’s loss of a good over striving to create it one’s self. Sloth feeds envy by making poverty. Pride denies responsibility for one’s circumstances. Wrath, pride’s great ally, distracts the sinner from his own responsibility , disrupting the reason meant to assist our judgement. Lust and greed turn the pro-creative impulse to exploitation.
All of us are subject to these sins. But socialism makes them virtues, first and foremost by exalting envy, the original sin.
The world-wide rise in anti-Semitism, the hatred of Israel taught in our universities, those centers of envy, sloth, anger and anti-being, is real in its own right. But is also a proxy for hatred of America, the land preserved by God for the greatest achievements of His co-creators, men and women who made a Garden in the wilderness and did so explicitly in His name and to His glory.
Our culture over the past couple centuries has trivialized virtue rendering it mere “morality” which in turn is used mostly as a negative, a list of things forbidden.
Virtue is the opposite of a negative. Virtue is the fulfillment of nature, the “filling in” of Being. When a thing is made more like its nature—when a tree is tended so it bears fruit, or a house is made strong enough to withstand a storm—we call the thing “good” as God saw his creation was “good.” When Hank Reardon in Atlas shrugged tries to articulate his passion for the metal he has invented—far stronger and lighter than steel—Ayn Rand, the strident atheist who was one of the two greatest Catholic writers of the twentieth century, has him finally say “Reardon Metal is good.”
The great war of our time, the great war of all times, is between “yes” and “no”; between affirming and building upon what He called good and resenting and destroying the co-creations of our neighbors.
America at its best is a land of co-creators. Israel, that supremely creative nation is our most natural friend and ally. Hamas, and Hezbollah, and Iran’s mullahs are angry, envious, destructive haters. Which of the two we support now is a test of whether America can still be called good.
"We are in the midst of a global culture war between the achievers and the destroyers, the producers and the wasters, the providers and the moochers...."
Yes!!