Keep Right — Column by Ralph K. Ginorio
We live in urgent times. Decisions that we make will determine nothing less than whether or not we will remain a free people, and whether or not there will still be a free world beyond this decade. No pressure, though.
Urgency is uncomfortable. To meet urgent situations, a person must exert themselves enough to sweat and must care enough to worry about the outcome. Urgent times test mind, body, and soul. They winnow out the wheat from the chaff, the weak from the strong, and the foolish from the wise.
Fight or flight, kill or be killed, fish or cut bait; a sense of urgency is an adrenalized warning to rise to face a dangerous challenge or be cut down by it. Urgent crises may be meditated upon after the fact, but in that consequential moment fraught with risk every iota of mental acuity is needed to earn survival and success.
Traditionally, men prepare themselves to prevail in physical combat while women ready themselves to endure childbirth. Every one of us meets circumstances fraught with the possibility that we might not prevail or even survive.
Few people welcome urgency with joy. Those who are strong and wise understand that these doom-tinged moments are definitive, revealing who we really are. Others strive their utmost to avoid these harrowing ordeals, lest they be revealed as insufficient to the needs of the moment. The fey among us thrill to the reality that in these moments a person holds their fate in their own hands.
Sheltered civilians imagine that a protected peace and plenty is the norm in life, with danger being an unwelcome exception. Protectors know the truth of what George Orwell once said.
People sleep peaceably in their beds at night only because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.
George Orwell
Students of history and of human nature cannot help but recognize just how rare and precious are peace, prosperity and protection.
Many among our most privileged elites, sheltered by whatever their ancestors’ labors provided, embrace self-destructive idealism. Effecting anti-military snobbery and anti-police sanctimony, these precious snowflakes excuse all crime and damn all guardians.
These sensitive souls even assert that, if it weren’t for the violent capabilities of our sentinels, there would be no violence. To use a comic book analogy, they weave psychological theories contending that Batman’s existence creates the Joker and that Gotham City would be better off without him.
By their same logic, America would be better off without our police and military and the world would be better off without America and the West. Delusional fantasies of anarchic utopia always follow such claims.
We are not born to live in paradise. We exist to fight for survival and also to achieve something more than mere existence. We can dedicate ourselves to serve what our consciences deem to be good; leading lives of struggle to make our world and the lives of our neighbors a bit better.
Children need innocence in order to grow healthy in spirit, mind, and body. They require protection. However, when children become adults this includes a recognition that we each become responsible for protecting what we deem to be worthwhile.
There are many among us who are so eager to dream that we are at peace that they resist recognizing anything like a crisis in today’s circumstances. They deny the urgency of our historic moment, claiming that calls to recognize this challenge is feverish paranoia.
These wishers for normal times are suicidally wrong. Our permanent Federal bureaucracy, including law enforcement, has joined with the media, academe, corporate America, and the entertainment industry in selling their souls in order to help Democrats bring about a global regulatory regime that is indistinguishable from totalitarianism.
Overseas, the Chinese Communist Party and their Russian, Korean, Pakistani, and Iranian catspaws threaten to spark a General War that they hope will overthrow Pax Americana and replace it with a new Sino-centric global order.
The recent American election gives us a fighting chance to restore liberty at home and peace abroad. Nothing less than the survival of the free world is at stake. These urgencies are as real as anything faced by Winston Churchill. Now, as then, these urgent times demand nothing less than our full commitment of blood, toil, tears, and sweat.
