The Galli Report: 01.23.21
Boomers' failures; 'everything is broken'; the temptation to do good; a pro-life mother's moving story; 50-hour origami project.
Yesterday, I was making my way across country by car after visiting my sister in Dallas. I thought about getting up at 4:00 a.m. before hitting the road, to get the weekly GR out in a timely way. Then I remembered that I was retired. And being retired means, among other things, not having to become a slave to a schedule.
So here you go, better late than never….
What’s the Problem Exactly?
This past two weeks, I found myself flagging articles the hovered around a large theme: the moral and cultural confusion in America. Perhaps with the start of a normal presidency, writers have time to think about bigger issues than what the President tweeted yesterday. Or maybe it’s just me, exhausted from politics and looking for a way forward. But given who I am, the way forward includes an analysis of the past and present. Here are three longish pieces that do that, each with its own emphasis. I’m not saying you should make time for all of them, but you might want to pick one or two.
“OK Boomers.” This is a review of the book by Helen Andrews: Boomers: The Men and Women Who Promised Freedom and Delivered Disaster.
If you’re at all familiar with Andrews’s previous work, you’ll know she’s not one to mince words. “The baby boomers,” she writes early in the book, “have been responsible for the most dramatic sundering of Western civilization since the Protestant Reformation.” Before they came along, according to Andrews, America was rich, democratic, unified, pious, and optimistic about the future; now, we are a divided nation of lonely, indebted, TV-and-pornography-addled depressives, so brainwashed by self-serving boomer propaganda that we can barely comprehend the enormity of what has been done to us. Perhaps worst of all, the boomers themselves don’t understand what they’ve done — they still think of themselves as heroes. Andrews would like to correct the record before they die.
“Everything Is Broken: And how to fix it” in the Jewish magazine The Tablet is a searing analysis of our addiction to “flatness” which, in the end, is largely about eliminating suffering. To me, her optimistic, “can-do” conclusion is not warranted by her hyperbolic description of the problem, and the essay’s logic falters here and there; still I think there is much to be said for her analysis.
Flatness is the reason the three jobs with the most projected growth in your country all earn less than $27,000 a year, and it is also the reason that all the secondary institutions that once gave structure and meaning to hundreds of millions of American lives—jobs and unions but also local newspapers, churches, Rotary Clubs, main streets—have been decimated. And flatness is the mechanism by which, over the past decade and with increasing velocity over the last three years, a single ideologically driven cohort captured the entire interlocking infrastructure of American cultural and intellectual life. It is how the Long March went from a punchline to reality, as one institution after another fell and then entire sectors, like journalism, succumbed to control by narrow bands of sneering elitists who arrogated to themselves the license to judge and control the lives of their perceived inferiors.
Flatness broke everything.
“The Last Temptation” by Father Stephen Freeman. If you only have time for one longish essay, I’d encourage you to read this one, for it brings theology to bear on one of the biggest temptations of our age, the biggest one Jesus faced in fact.
The whisper asks, “What manner of good could you do if you had all the power in the world?” I do not think of Christ being tempted with anything that smacked of self-aggrandizement. He doesn’t need to be the richest guy in the world. Strangely, the temptation lies in doing good – and doing good in a powerful way.
No time in human history has enjoyed the near omniscience and omnipotence of our present age. Live cams allow us to watch scenes in distant cities at a single click. News and information are nearly instantaneous. We are exploring the mysteries of the genome and playing with sub-atomic particles. The prowess of our technology gives rise to our imaginings of power. We contemplate the end of hunger, the end of racism, a new day in which people can be anything they imagine and be protected for imagining it….
The last temptation put before Christ is to be someone who He is not: to be a different God. To this He replies: “You shall worship the Lord your God, and Him only shall you serve” (Matt. 4:10). There will be no getting around the Cross. There will be no world in which suffering is healed without suffering. Jesus refuses the lottery ticket.
Choosing Suffering
On the proactive side, here is a moving piece by a Catholic mother who has not only risked her life that others might live, she also offers some practical ways to make progress in the pro-life cause.
So far, this year in the United States alone there have been nearly 50,000 abortions performed. Friends, we are only 22 days into the New Year and nearly 50,000 babies have died because abortion is considered a valuable commodity in our country. How can this be ok? More importantly, what can we do about it?...
Today, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, I ask that you pray with me for all those women who are facing crisis or unplanned pregnancies, for those who are facing medical emergencies in their pregnancies, for those who feel alone and abandoned in their time of need, and for all those who are facing a decision between life and death. Let God use us as His means to provide help and hope to those who need it most. I pray that God will wrap them in His arms and help them to see their worth, their child’s worth, and the joy that comes from choosing life.
Choosing Beauty
One activity that is relevant, no matter the dire nature of the times, is to create something beautiful. Paper in the right hands can be amazing. Here is a short video that condenses the “50 hour process of folding an origami samurai from a single square sheet of paper. No cutting or ripping used in the process.”
Grace and peace,
Mark Galli
markgalli.com