So, the president (or at least the White House – we have no idea how decisions are made in this administration) has decided it is time for Israel to stop clearing Hamas out of Gaza.  Forty-five minutes into the show and the caller consensus seems to be that Biden has altered his position for the sake of his re-elect.  If that is indeed the case, and it certainly seems to be, it indicates that Biden’s base has bought into the Gaza/Hamas as victim narrative and that Israel’s far superior military capability makes this an “unfair” fight.  This obsession with “fairness” has grown and grown in our cultural ethos as our concepts of equality have morphed from equal opportunities to equal outcomes.  It reflects an attitude of entitlement, and we see in this latest manifestation that it has completely morphed morality.  Rather than acts being good and evil, the only evil is now if someone has some perceived advantage over the other.

I have said it before and I’ll say it here again, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis is a must read, every few years, for anyone that is truly committed to being a good human being.  Its insights into human nature and how it can be perverted is extraordinary.  Recall, it is a series of letters from Uncle Screwtape, a middle-management demon in hell, to his nephew Wormwood – a young tempter in the field dealing with his first “patient.”  Most people get hung up right there as they don’t buy into concepts of Satan and hell and the like, but that is an excuse not to pursue the true insight in the book.  The book is obviously fiction and the premise a vehicle for what the book is trying to communicate.  One need not actually believe in demons to gain insight into how we can drift from good towards evil.

As I look at our shifting position vis-a-vie Israel and Gaza I am reminded of this extraordinary paragraph from the twelfth letter in Screwtape:

You will say that these are very small sins; and doubtless, like all young tempters, you are anxious to be able to report spectacular wickedness. But do remember, the only thing that matters is the extent to which you separate the man from the Enemy. It does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,

That is so descriptive of how we got to this place – a place where theft of values less than $950 goes unprosecuted and where we call for the end of efforts to destroy a genocidal evil.  We started by giving college admission advantages to minorities based solely on their minority status (not equal really, but compassionate) and gently, slowly, softly, some decades later we end up supporting genocidal terrorists because they are also a minority.  Spectacular wickedness achieved.

Trying to balance the scales of “fairness” we have ended up endorsing genocide.  “Fairness,” it turns out, is anything but.  There is no fairness in trained assassins being parachuted into a place to murder, rape and behead – to say there is only justifies great evil.  Such acts balance no scales, they are, simply, atrocious and intolerable.  Evil on that level must be, at a minimum, contained, preferably destroyed.

Somehow it does not feel sufficient to oppose this proposal from our current administration.  I am compelled to also weep for our moral confusion.