We too naturally tend to fight darkness with darkness rather than light.
Our response to evil, rather than a “liberal” capitulation to a universal humanism which has no basis in reality, should be only the most violent condemnation and rejection of every dark inhuman instinct of the heart.
When the impulse that moves the blades of the East is the same impulse that fingers the triggers of the West, it is not possible that either be good, or that one is better justified than the other. Both are always and only what they are, which is a self-consuming aggression. Evil flows unbounded in the world even as we rant about borders and walls. Containing the uncontainable is impossible. Recognizing national origins, making note of the evil that my enemy commits, disapproving in others the very thing that lies beneath my own judgment keeps the evil always in play.
Killing, bombing, the oneupmanship of evil we call shock-and-awe—this disposing of problems indiscriminately and efficiently is easy when compared to the work of building solutions, waiting out an impulsive enemy, exhibiting wisdom in the face of reactive anger gone completely to emotion and to blood. This work remains, always, the difficult thing.
We must call on what’s best in us in order to combat what’s worst in us. If we fail to forge light we are cornered by a dark alternative, an alternative whose very essence is the impulse to suicide and self-destruction. No longer local (those days are long gone) these impulses now reverberate globally. And so the world is called to a great reckoning with itself. Emmanuel. Peace on earth. Good will toward men.