Up Is Down and Down Is Up

All those UFOs that have recently been sighted revive the old question: Is there intelligent life out there in space? But there is a more crucial question: Is there intelligent life here on earth?

Specifically, a visitor from outer space would be convinced that the US has been hijacked by the mentally unhinged, and that the inmates control the asylum. Murder rates, violent crime, and civil disorder are up all over the country, but despite all this, there are persistent cries to defund the police and eliminate law enforcement. Criminals who were caught on camera perpetrating their crimes are released from custody without bail, violent convicts who are serving time are given early release, legislators and civic leaders declare with a straight face that in order to increase law and order, we need less law enforcement. A Philadelphia district attorney refuses to prosecute thefts and other violations because it is “picking on the poor.”

Thinking has become muddled, and language has become meaningless. Crime no longer means crime, and breaking into department stores and stealing from them is not theft, but “reparations,” the rights of criminals are protected as against the rights and safety of their victims, the victims become the criminals and the criminals are the victims, mantras and slogans take the place of reason, “systemic racism” and “white privilege” become the marching orders of hoodlums and gangsters. Human vocabulary is corrupted, so that one may no longer use the word “convicts” but must say “formerly incarcerated”; one may not say “gang” but instead use “ group” or “schoolmates.” Criminal behavior is described as civil disobedience or acts of social justice. Where the social order has decayed, there is no such thing as guilt. And, to lend some comedy to all this, the august Princeton University will no longer require graduate students majoring in classics to be proficient in Greek and Latin, because of — guess what? — “systemic racism.” The last mishnah in Sotah (49b), depicting a topsy-turvy world just before the final Redemption, has come true. Up is down and down is up.

The fact is that redefining language or decriminalizing theft and violent crimes, or blaming the police, is not the solution. “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in our selves.” So-called systemic racism is not the cause. This is clearly a false narrative. America banned de jure segregation in 1954, and has instituted pro-minority affirmative action since 1967. No country that has had a two-term black president, a black vice president, several black secretaries of state, several black military chiefs of staff, a black secretary of defense, and  black congressmen, governors, and mayors can be said to be racist. Certainly there is bias in the human heart, but to blame the system is to disregard these hard truths.