At long last, a fresh Precipice post
I re-emerge from personal ill health to find our culture at peak sickness
First, a word about my health situation: I appear to be on the other side of the ordeal that has devoured much of my spring and summer. It’s only recently that I feel confident about making such a pronouncement. Hours after I posted the linked piece - my last before this one - I was back in the ER, and more such trips followed. It’s only since, on the basis of the weekly blood tests that my infectious-disease team ordered, I’ve been declared MRSA-free and cut loose from the antibiotic that wreaked as much bodily havoc as the bacterium itself that I’ve crawled my way back to some approximation of normalcy.
Along with bodily repair, I’m now in the process of piecing back together such aspects of my life as work and medium-range plans (particularly a couple of trips that, even with an improved personal-health picture, are contingent on the latest spike in the public-health situation that’s beset us all since March 2020).
I thank all who are reading this. It indicates to me that you didn’t completely give up on the notion of Precipice community that I’d been building since December 2019. I now owe you resumed continuity.
I find myself re-entering engagement with the world at a time when our national health, in steady decline since my childhood, is experiencing a particularly acute episode of that decline. America’s spiritual, cultural, political and economic sickness at present begs for a trip to an ER, but the only one equipped to address the country’s dire state is of little interest to anyone in any kind of leadership position.
Obviously, the example of our plight currently front and center among claims on our attention is America’s utter humiliation on the world stage as the Taliban is declaring Afghanistan to be an Islamic Emirate from the presidential palace in Kabul and the US Embassy is telling US citizens to avoid the airport because it’s taking fire.
Current US president Biden is anxious to portray himself as saddled with a policy put in place by his predecessor, and he has a bit of leverage in that regard. Trump got his own taste of Taliban humiliation in September 2019 when he had to hurriedly cancel plans to host a delegation from that organization at Camp David - Camp David - due to a Taliban car-bomb attack in Kabul. Nevertheless, the following February, in a move with the same odor about it as the beautiful-letters attempt at patty-cake with North Korea, he signed a deal that did in fact put America on a path of withdrawing all troops from Afghanistan.
Still, Biden had means of circumvention at his disposal. He could have used the fact that the agreement was not a treaty ratified by Congress to insist on maintaining a remnant force to continue to ensure the status quo that, however imperfect, was ensuring that women in Afghanistan continued progress toward full societal participation and, more to the national-security point, had ensured that no catastrophic jihadist attacks on America emanated from there.
Rather, he chose to perpetuate a foreign-policy pattern he’d already established:
A development like this doesn't happen in a vacuum. Following as this does on the heels of two other colossal Biden-administration foreign-policy blunders - allowing completion of the Nord Stream pipeline in Europe, and inviting a team from the UN Human Rights Council to come to the US to assess our societal health regarding race relations - it's apt to leave allies as bewildered as Trump's erratic approach did.
While this is unfolding, other signs of national sickness persist.
The country is experiencing yet another spike in COVID-19, this one taking the form of the Delta variant, and a considerable swath of the populace wants to make mask-wearing policy and vaccination, even at the local level, a hill to die on, leading to large numbers of the nation’s school children witnessing the spectacle of their parents accusing their community’s school boards of a totalitarianism such as that being imposed in Afghanistan.
Such a stance significantly erodes credibility regarding parents’ genuine concerns about curricula and library books that are indeed destructive of the millennia-old understanding on the part of the entire human species regarding human sexuality. The dismissals from those whose agenda is that very destruction write themselves.
Not that much of our so-called leadership in the political, cultural and even religious realms doesn’t make a mockery of the Creator’s intent for interaction between the two sexes. We’ve seen the disgrace of the scion of a dynasty in one major political party followed by a sex-traficking scandal in the other.
Speaking of that latter party, two thirds of its registrants still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen. It has ostracized the only elected officials within it who are recognizably conservative by pre-2016 standards, even as it confers standard-bearer status on its most sycophantic and rudderless figures. Many once deservedly revered thought leaders of the “conservative movement,” whatever that means at this late date, have completely jettisoned all credibility and opted for cartoonish fealty to the cult that has largely subsumed that movement.
Conversely, it’s taken as a given by anyone proud to wear the progressive mantle that racism in America has not only not shrunk to being a residual factor of secondary importance at best but is still as “systemic” as it ever was. As in the case with mainstreaming the distortion of human sexuality in education from pre-K to post-graduate activity, this presumption pervades not just the humanities but indeed the quantitative sciences, which are under fire for their very quantitativeness.
It’s into this milieu that I re-emerge from my weeks of being out of commission.
As I say, I find it reassuring that you’ve checked in as I do so. I’ve had time - lots and lots of time - to contemplate the mission of Precipice. I realize that those of us inhabiting the narrow sliver of terrain not occupied by any of the above societal elements make for one of the smallest communities on the map, but consider this a venue where you are reassured that you’re not alone.