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The Morning Rant: Minimalist Edition

An honest appraisal of the state of America and the West yields a discouraging -- even a depressing -- answer. The glory of Western culture, with its technological, artistic, and social brilliance is being subsumed by a chaotic and narcissistic world-view, coupled with the profoundly anti-human authoritarianism of the left that is gleefully using that world-view to further its evil ends.

William Butler Yeats* was terrifyingly prescient in the first part of The Second Coming:

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 conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Things are indeed falling apart, and our center is not holding, yet we are curiously passive..indeed, ignorant...of the damage being done to us and our society. We are being bullied by those with the "passionate intensity" of people who are convinced of their rightness, and will brook no dissent! But as J.J. Sefton pointed out this morning, we are in a sort of a ""zombie state" where we live in an illusion of regular order," but that order is an illusion.

Commenter "Polynikes" made an important point that in the macro speaks obliquely to the same point that Sefton made...

Not trying to be contrarian but I think the allowed violence in prison is one of our biggest failures as a First World country. If the prisoner deserves to be killed, we should have sentenced him to that. If not, it's the states responsibility to protect the prisoner from harm while they do their sentence.

I don't think a car thief should be the same prison as a mentally ill murderer. I don't think the threat of being someone's bitch should exist either to the extent it does. Prisons shouldn't be Criminal College and the inmates shouldn't basically run them.

He was referring to the prison stabbing of Larry Nassar, the ex-physician for USA Gymnastics and Michigan State University, and by extension the rampant violence and chaos in our worst prisons.

Our society has lost control of our penal system, just as we have lost control of our streets, our borders, our justice system, our education system, our ability to care for our children...yet most of us wander aimlessly through the overwhelming evidence of societal decay with a blind eye turned toward it.

As much as many of us cheered on that stabbing (and I am no different), we do so at our peril. It is a coarsening of our culture to support, even tacitly, such a state of affairs. A moral society does not choose when to suspend morality to please the bloodlust within us, to appease the understandable desire for revenge.

My hope is that the left's miscalculation with transgenderism and the assault on our children will be inflection point where our culture says, "enough!" Yes, we should protect our children, but we should also protect everyone from the depredations of the madness that Yeats spoke of. That means our prisoners and our unborn babies and yes, thugs on the streets of our cities and sexual abusers and the dregs of society.

The rule of law underpins much of the society that we all wish for, and we cannot pick and choose which laws apply based on our feelings, because that makes us exactly like the people we need to fight for the soul of our country, and the soul of Western culture.

*Yes, he was a bit of a loon with the séances and the visitations, but still...