… honor is blackened by patricide … no amount of high-sounding formalities will make it white again.

Catherynne M. Valente, in In the Night Garden

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I am regrettably too often stunned by how it is that we can report on daily events and miss their collective message – what the cumulative nature of something that is seen singularly and episodically can tell us.

It seems that those with access to the public stage have no depth or width of intellect. While a trend or recurrent series of like-kind events can connote a pattern, give us a larger context and way of understanding and responding, we are blind, clueless because we are illiterate – largely narrowly educated, not contemplative, thoughtful.

Patricide (the killing of one’s father) is an example.

Patricide spans the mythology and history of humankind in virtually all cultures from the early days of recorded history to the present.

I thought of this in response to the concerted hatred of President Donald Trump. The uniform hatred seems instant and extreme and signals a larger issue.

Then, I thought of the rejection of the Divine – from God is Dead to atheism and the forced privatization of religion and the attack on religious liberty under the Constitution.

Then, I thought of the feminist movement and its implicit attack on men.  Then, of “White Privilege” and its aim at white males.  Then, the rash of assassinations of police officers (a symbol of male authority).  Then, of the general curve of the “sexual revolution” and its bending of gender understandings.  Then, of the assault on Confederate statutes, and now on Thomas Jefferson and George Washington and the assault on the legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution.  And then, the disregard for the loss of the workers (largely men) in the former industrial, lunch pail class.  And then, public policies which have hastened the absence of fathers from families.

There seems to be too many things that implicitly take aim at men not to warrant some analytical thinking which just might detect a movement that is harmful, costly, hostile, divisive.

Societies and cultures rise and fall on the strength of common beliefs (some good and others bad).  Examining themes is essential to self-understanding (individual and collective) – otherwise, we are traveling blindly, ruled by unexamined views, the innate passions they evoke in us … and a mob that soon gathers.

This, indeed, is the environment for grave error, mass error and the powers of darkness it produces.

Our best bet: slow down, see clearly what it before you, put it to a moral test.

Moderation is always preferable to extreme behavior for the former embodies humility while the latter does not.

Shalom.