Edward Curtin is a decent person with a sense of justice and a moral conscience, traits more common in his time than today.  I found his moral responses reassuring, and wonder if recent generations would respond in the same way.

Curtin, I suspect, was a member of the old moderate left, which was concerned with fairness and pushing a reform here and there.  Today this left remains only in its elderly remnants.  The modern left is not reformist.  It is revolutionary, committed to using law, government, and media to overthrow traditional society and replace it with a Sodom & Gomorrah Tower of Babel in which merit is regarded as a white racist tool. 

Today the left, as epitomized by the Biden regime, pushes DEI over merit, sexual perversity over love between a man and a woman, sexualization of young children, demonization of white people as racists, and ideology over truth. Today for the left the truth resides in the ideological agenda, not in facts.

Despite the digital revolution, the Internet, social media, email, and texting, the acquisition of truthful information has become ever more difficult.  The reason is that for almost all parties concerned, it is the agenda that is important, not the facts.  A consequence is that, unlike in the past, today we live in narratives orchestrated to serve agendas. As Curtin puts it, "we are living in a pretend society" in which truth is not present.

Curtin's essays, like my own, vary in quality, but every decent person will enjoy escape from social media into thought about what is happening to us.  I am not going to attempt to organize Curtin's essays around a theme.  I am going to limit my comments to two of his essays. 

The first is about what has become of Christmas.  As my readers know, for several decades it has been my habit to republish my Christmas essay, "The Greatest Gift of All," to remind people that Christianity gave us freedom and meaning in our lives.  In the Massachusetts town in which Curtin and his wife live, Christmas fireworks are a feature.  As he and his wife inside their home sit holding and trying to calm the family dogs, "sentient animals with deep feelings," who are quaking uncontrollably, Curtin thinks of "children in Gaza quivering in fear as the Israelis bomb them night and day in savage attacks" and thinks of "the visceral sense of what those Palestinians  must be feeling as they hold their trembling children" who are declared by Israel's leader to be "useless objects."  

It is America's shame that the entire government of the United States, including President Trump, the media, and the brainwashed and indoctrinated hapless American population  accept the destruction of a people, even enable it with weapons and money and deportation of persons with sufficient moral conscience to protest the genocide of a nation.  Curtin has every right to raise the question, what kind of people have Americans become?