Posted on 07/08/2003 12:49:10 AM PDT by abigail2
Tolerating Evil Is No Longer Tolerable
Exclusive commentary by Patrick Rooney
July 7, 2003
I went to see a fireworks show on July fourth. No patriotic music or words, just twenty minutes of moderately interesting visual pyrotechnics. No one seemed to mind. Masses of people thought nothing of building their day around the fireworks, bringing barbeque, drink, and children, and enduring major traffic, crowds, and weary legs. For what, exactly?
I pondered fireworks, gutted of their symbolic meaning, as I went to bed. Course I didnt get to sleep right away. Theres something about the periodic boom of nearby M-80s that has a way of well, waking you up. As I lay awake, I began to reflect on the perversion of July 4th. Fireworks, once meant to celebrate our freedom, are too often just another distraction for the bored, or worse, one more bludgeoning tool for the corrupt. I reflected further, and realized that just about everything good in America has been fashioned into a weapon to beat down our gates.
The law is a perfect example of this. Once it protected good and punished evil.
But in America today, according to the Supreme Courts thirty-year-old ruling, you can legally kill an unborn child. In fact, you can make a killingching, chingby killing children. If I were to defend this right, Id be considered a hero, standing up for womens rights. Now if I were to try to prevent such a killing by attempting to stop an abortion doctor or patient from killing a baby, I would go to jail. And needless to say, be written off as a right wing fascist.
In America today, according to the recent ruling of the Supreme Court, there is now a right to sodomy. If I were to defend this right, Id be considered a human rights advocate. And if I refused to hire a sodomite or rent an apartment to a gay couple, I could be in big legal trouble. And of course Id be called a Nazi.
Somewhere along the line contemporary society got this notion that we are more compassionate, more loving than our narrow forefathers. After all, they allowed slavery, killed animals, and smoked cigarettes.
So we became lenient with the guilty. More humane with the worst among us. And necessarily we became more harsh with the innocent.
Today we have a Republican President. A Republican majority in the House and Senate. A supposedly conservative Supreme Court. A growing army of conservative talk show hosts, authors, and columnists. And were losing ground. The federal government continues to grow, and our culture continues to spin out of control. Why?
Because we are too embarrassed to assert our morality. We have removed our morality from the national equation, thinking that it would be the polite thing to do, and we expected the same of our adversaries. But we did not count on the fact that they would act in bad faith, laughing at us as we backpedaled our values, and they gleefully inserted their amorality into the vacuum we left for them.
Evil is not fair. Evil is not just. Evil is not interested in a Mexican standoff. Its a struggle to the death, and its about time we understood the commitment it will take to win. Our president understands this principle in the war on terror. He needs to understand that his attitude must be the same on every front, particularly our domestic security front. The time for politicking is gone. Politicking gets people killed in todays world.
There is really only one way out. To realize the foolishness of our ways. To recognize the wisdom of our forefathers, that our compassion is merely leniency for evil, resulting in the dishonoring and ultimate dismembering of good.
America is a Christian nation. We are tolerant, yes, of the existence of other religions or no religion at all, but we can never be tolerant of evil.
Reclaiming our nation means reasserting our morality in every area of life: legal, medical, political, entertainment, and education. Particularly education. We are losing our young to the corrupt, and until that reverses, we will continue to suffer.
Tolerance for evil is clearly something we can no longer afford to tolerate.
Patrick Rooney is the Director of Special Projects at BOND, the Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny, a nonprofit organization dedicated to Rebuilding the Family By Rebuilding the Man.
For more information, please visit www.bondinfo.org , call 1-800-411-BOND (2663), or write to feedback@washingtondispatch.com.
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
We became arrogant.
And I completely agree with his point on fireworks.
It's a small thing, but it illustrates well how we take something sacred, or somethign that's deserving of reverence and respect and commercialize it to the point it becomes un-recognizable.
The 4th isn't about fireworks, just as Christmas isn't about presents, Easter isn't about eggs, thanksgiving isn't about turkeys and so on and so forth.
We commemorate something and then we come right back and convolute & confuse it till any importance it may have previously had is well hidden.
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