The 2023 Precipice Christmas message

Cultivate the clarity needed to cast off all dross and recognize the real gold

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow doesn’t seem to have the more persuasive argument as we enter the final run-up to Christmas and as 2023 nears its wrap-up. The bells may be pealing loudly, but the present moment, it seems to me, could be characterized as the Age of the Prevalence of the Wrong.

From the world stage level to post-American national politics to a downward cultural spiral that knows no bottom, what instinctively seems right and good in most situations to those who still have a functioning moral compass is getting buried beneath the onslaught of its opposite.

Ukraine ought - and I mean that in a moral sense - to achieve a total victory over Russia, entailing a return to pre-2014 borders, but that looks less likely by the day. The West has never provided Ukraine with what it actually needs to quickly bring about such a state of affairs. A number of factors have made this so, among them the contrarian stance of Hungary’s Orban, but most importantly Joe Biden’s fear that doing so would invite Russia to consider upping the ante to the nuclear level.

So at some point the scenario envisioned by the Realpolitik types as well as their populist-nationalist kindred spirits is likely to be reified. The nation that blatantly aggressed upon its neighbor, in violation of the rules-based international order in place since 1945, will sit at the table with the nation whose sovereignty it violated, and probably some other parties as well, and hammer out something that badly erodes that order. It will be wrong, and millions of Ukrainians will never get the lives they had before the invasion back.

Israel may achieve its good and right goal of completely destroying Hamas, but the cost will be high. And with each passing day, more voices try to draw a grotesquely ill-fitting parallel with the Ukraine situation. Because Israel’s response to the October 7 demonstration of evil has been of such magnitude, many are losing sight of the moral dynamics of the situation. It doesn’t help that “mainstream” news media outlets don’t seem interested in stressing, when they show pictures of devastated hospitals or Gaza children pulled from rubble, that public buildings such as hospitals and schools house Hamas offices that sit over the vast tunnel network that sprawls throughout the strip. In fact, several doctors and nurses at Kamal Adwan hospital in Jabaliya “were Hamas operatives serving in the al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the terror organization” and several more staff members were Palestinian Islamic Jihad’s Al-Quds Brigades members. Humanitarian aid does in fact get into Gaza daily, but the humanitarian situation worsens. Israel is being about as careful as it can, but the UN doesn’t see it the way.

And Iran is operating on a broader scale. The harassment Hezbollah is doling out on Israel’s border with Lebanon is no longer a mere nuisance; it’s now closer to full-scale war. Yemen-based Houthis don’t seem fazed by the joint naval force formed among US allies to protect commercial shipping in the Red Sea.

Here in post-America, it looks likely at this point that the most vile, infantile, vindictive and solipsistic person to ever enter US politics will return to the Oval Office in January 2025. Several factors are at play in that situation. The Democrats are saddled with an opposing candidate, who now sort of serves as US president, whose physical and mental abilities to handle the job are fading fast, and who has always been an empty suit who sustained his Beltway career on pseudo-moral preening that kept him in the basically good graces of the progressive movement that owns that party. There is also the horrifying lockstep in which the slavishly devoted members of the Very Stable Genius’s cult march. They will do their master’s bidding to whatever extent is necessary to see that he returns to power.

Examples of why post-America can’t have nice things abound these days.

In the abstract, an organization called Moms for Liberty ought to be a fine thing, a countervailing force to the cultural rot that permeates public education. Alas, its leadership has engaged in hypocrisy on steroids, giving the cynics and the supporters of post-America’s cultural unraveling low-hanging fruit with which to discredit the effort to stop it.

So will education be okay, now that this hypocrisy has been exposed? No. Consider what we have learned in the last week about the state of things in the field’s highest echelons. Presidents of our most elite universities can’t bring themselves to say unreservedly that calls on their campuses for the extermination of Jews is unacceptable. And the president of the nation’s oldest university, Claudine Gay of Harvard, has been proven to be a complete intellectual fraud, up to her eyeballs in evidence of plagiarism.

As in the above-discussed Ukraine situation, we are going to adopt a this-is-just-how-it-is-it’s-too-late-to-reverse-the-rot stance. So Harvard has become completely untethered from its original mission as a training ground for clergy, and the example is thus set for all lower levels of the ever-more quaint national effort to inculcate upcoming generations with a desire to pursue the question of what makes a human life worth living.

This is where we are two days out from Christmas 2023.

Yes, Christ’s message to us regarding who he is and the unshakable nature of the kingdom over which his father reigns remains as true as it ever was. But institutional Christianity is doing a pathetically ineffective job of getting most post-Americans to give a flying diddly.

So spare us the insipid platitudes and excitement over the latest Asbury College revival and message movie that makes momentary box-office noise.

We are in trouble.

Yes, we need to pray. What we need to pray for is for the very real God who governs this universe to hit us hard between the eyes and drive us to our knees.

2023 concludes with us surrounded by proof that we can’t do this thing called human existence on our own.

And even that fact is fraught with trickiness. Plenty of charlatans are delivering this message, but in the service of untoward agendas.

So let us muster all the clarity we can, and humble ourselves to the requisite extent, so that the only strength worth having can be ours.

It’s dark out there, and not likely to get lighter soon.