*Our prayers go out for all the victims and, yes, the perpetrators of yesterday’s attacks in Belgium. We are up against a determined enemy, willing to kill, and to die, for their disordered cause. Nothing so motivates a man as religious zeal, but we must recall that that does not make religion evil. Corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is the worst: It is only because religion is so good, that it can be so evil.
*As I have written before, everyone has a ‘religion’, that one thing which is ‘master of his affections’ as Saint Thomas puts it. Many in our world, it seems, have a fickle religion, their own pleasure, the fleeting desires of the moment, an effervescent chasing after new experiences. This is a puerile stuff, compared to which the Islam of the ‘Islamic State’ is cold, hard steel, through which it has and will continue to cut a swath of destruction, as they have already promised to do in Britain and America.
*Yet we continue to attenuate and eviscerate the very forces that might stand up to such a threat. It is curious that on the very day of the attacks it was announced in America that the Marines, in many ways the world’s premier fighting force, will now be forced to undergo ‘sensitivity sessions’ to integrate women into their front-line forces. They have already been forced to integrate homosexuals under the Clintonian regime. One of the aspects in the new ‘sensitivity training’ will be to teach the men, and now the women, how to organize their sleeping arrangements out in the field without getting, shall we say, frisky or untoward. Hmm. I would posit they might figure that out for themselves, not always for the good of those involved.
*Most front-line Marines, reports and common sense tell us, are against this ill-advised integration, and rightly so. Women should not be in front line combat, for a whole host of reasons.
*I am not sure of the stance of Donald Trump on this question, but, at least at a superficial level on other topics, he seems to cut through the miasma of similar vapid and irrational political correctness (but, alas, often with his own vapid and miasmic comments).
* Would that we had a leader of true moral, intellectual and spiritual integrity! To paraphrase Saint Augustine, however, we get the leaders we deserve, and I fear we may only regain sanity in our culture through a great deal of suffering that brings us back to our senses, and to our knees.
*And speaking of insanity, Trudeau’s recent ‘budget’, and I put that word in scare quotes since not much is ‘budgeted’, is a pure paradigm of Keynesian and socialist principles, ‘directing a fire hose of cash at pet Liberal causes’, as one commentator put it. Whatever their misguided intentions (will an extra 8.4 billion dollars really help ‘Native causes’?), Canada seems headed for a looming default on its unmanageable debt, far bigger and far less fixable than the crisis in Greece. Add another 30-odd billion. What does it matter? We are on our way to becoming a bankrupt third-world country.
*We may have to hit the wall in more ways than one for us to ‘get it’. Of course, one could adopt the wisdom of the Church’s social teaching, applied in a rational manner to the concrete circumstances in which one finds oneself, and things would be much better. But, alas, no. We have to learn the hard way, through the destructive policies of Trudeau and his fawning ministers, given all the air time they want on the meretricious bought-and-paid-for CBC.
*And, on a final note for today’s musings, I was surprised to learn that George Orwell, whose real name was Eric Blair, was firmly and unavowedly against contraception, and in fact predicted that it would not only destroy true love and affection, but would become a nefarious tool used by a totalitarian State to enslave its populace (such a State vividly brought to life by his bleak dystopia 1984). The article is well worth a read in First Things, but I will leave you with a sobering thought from the great author, which applies just as much to our times as to his own, which sums up my own far better than I could express:
It is in fact in moments of moral and spiritual struggle . . . that men and women come nearest to being real. If you do away with this struggle, and maintain that by tolerance, benevolence, inoffensiveness and a redistribution or increase of purchasing power, combined with a devotion, on the part of the elite, to Art, the world will be as good as anyone could require, then you must expect human beings to become more and more vapourous.
*So stay real, and stay true, for vaporous becomes us not. A blessed Triduum to all!