Sleepless in America

There are people dying in the world, right now, at the hands of psychopaths, tyrants, ideologues. But the country takes a break from all that to chew, like a cow chews its cud (or a dog returns to its own excrement), on the shriveled flesh of Deep Throat. Herein lies our nation's attention, at least the media's attention and the liberal forces that dominate those media.

But to hell with all that.

Recently it was revealed that a young girl not ten years old was raped and murdered in Florida, killed by being buried alive. The other day in Jamaica Plain, a Boston neighborhood, a 97-year-old woman was found bludgeoned to death, her cooling body rolled up in a rug in her home; her LifeLine button having been pushed during the attack. These are two of the deaths in just a few short days which occured in this quagmire of a country we call America, the land of the free; where such deaths occur daily.

Where is the outrage? Where are the protesters in the street? Where is the self-immolation, the rending of garments, the gnashing of justice-hungry teeth? Where is the Human Rights Task Force, where is Amnesty International; where is the ACLU? Where is Jesse Jackson?

Of course. The Human Rights Task Force is in New Ipswich, NH protesting a police chief's decision to arrest an illegal alien on trespassing charges. Amnesty International is in some fairyland where Guantanamo Bay is compared to gulags of the Soviet Union, which trivializes the REAL deaths of millions of innocent, non-combative people at the hands of socialist visionaries. The ACLU is busy suing America for alleged atrocities in that same alleged American gulag. And Jesse Jackson is somewhere over the rainbow.

You've seen bumper stickers, you've heard the clarion call, written in the imperative: "Think globally, Act locally." It is a thrilling statement, popular on the political left, giving those who hold it close to their hearts a heady sense that they are global, responsible citizens. But it is a damnable idea: Thinking globally is precisely what is wrong with my leftist friends. For they are like those who, drunk with religious ardor, are "too heavenly minded to be any earthly good." But, instead of being inebriated with the elixir of the transcendent, my liberal friends are plastered on globalism: they are too globally minded to be any local good.

Thus explains the indifference to personal and domestic problems here, stateside, in our neighbors' homes. A young girl is stolen out of her bed, having been safely tucked in at her grandparents' home. She is taken to a trailer, held and raped and sodomized for three days by a creepy man with complicit friends who lie to police concerning his where-abouts. Eventually the little girl, ravaged and perverted by another human being, is buried alive, only to die in darkness and dire isolation.

And my peacenik friends hold signs on countless streetsides calling for an end to war.

I have no right to joy, I have no entitlement to equality or justice or beauty or fairness or even free speech, knowing that a little girl was dying, buried alive, while I drank wine with friends or celebrated the coming of spring. I cannot sleep, ever again, without feeling the weight of death and hearing the stifled cries of a dying girl underground. I cannot sleep knowing that a child was so ravaged even God will have a hard time healing her. How, pray tell, is He expected to fix her wounds?

I am tempted to hand out ball-peen hammers so that people can smash to bits any bumper sticker that reads, "Think globally, Act locally." And I am tempted to ban the use of "hate crime" rhetoric deployed by liberal fussmongers when some teenagers scrawl racial epithets on cemetery walls; not because I am a racist, but because liberal fussmongers have never once proposed "hate crime" legislation when it is clear certain sociopaths target children because they are children; and truly hate-filled crimes occur.

The ACLU and all its clones take umbrage at Christian prayers at football games or alleged mishandlings of the Koran in prisons; and yet they ignore the prayers of buried girls imprisoned in boxes.

Truth be told, the bumper sticker should read "Think and act locally." But not locally in the sense of your local community or church, or even your neighbor's patio. Those are still too broad. The only locale each one of us should be passionately concerned about, where we should be fighting for godliness and purity and healing and grace and forgiveness, is the only locale that ever matters, and it is the only one we really know: Our own hearts. Take care of your own soul, nurture it with goodness and truth and mercy and kindness and love, and discover that, if all men and women would mind their own business in the truest sense, the globe would indeed be a better place.

But we stumble over snails and leap over lions in an epidemic of misplaced priorities, and misplaced indignation. It is easy to rebuke a nation; it is easy to protest a war. What is not easy is to love yourself with God's light; to love a buried child, and to protest our own very local sins. Protesters spend hours in lines telling us all how bad certain people's hearts are, without ever looking at their own hearts that quietly beat out the message in a divine Morse code: that God would seriously like it if they'd just shut up and quietly dress themselves in the sackcloth of their own monumental guilt.

Push your LifeLine, now, while you have a chance. Before you are beaten by the hypocrisies of the age. Before you are abducted and raped by the zeitgeist knocking on your TV set, or handing out chocolates in your newspaper.

Before you are chained and buried alive in the gulag of self-righteousness.

Before Deep Throat sucks you dry.

Contratimes

©Bill Gnade 2005