I regarded again at my closing put up of 2022, Sins of Omission, corrected the typos out of compulsion, and contemplated the place we gone over the previous 12 months. It was a great put up, and even immediately, it felt true. However a lot because the poisonous American political local weather hasn’t actually modified a lot over the previous 12 months, and gives little promise of change in 2024, the Hamas terrorist assault of October seventh and its ensuing conflict in Gaza has bubbled up the elemental variations between a liberal democratic nation and the swell of simplistic authoritarianism of the younger.
Others in my place have adopted the woke view of the world, some as a result of they wanted the validation that comes from espousing the favored views of progressives, and others as a result of they had been by no means fairly as critical as I believed. Or hoped. However what number of extra marches by the younger and unduly passionate who justify terrorism and abruptly discover rape and homicide acceptable when carried out by these they’re tribe tells them to favor?
Will 2024 be an inflection level, the place individuals lastly come to grips with the truth that they’ve change into the enemy they righteously believed they had been combating? At first, it appears there could be an epiphany, a realization that dividing the world into the oppressed and oppressors was an childish strategy to cope with the various issues dealing with society. However since then, it’s change into obvious that the younger and unduly passionate have fallen again into their tribal methods, having fun with the contemporary air of sowing distress on blocked highways for an irrational and harmful trigger.
I by no means would have believed in my outdated man head that we’d be again to open Jew hatred once more. But right here we’re, and tens of hundreds of people that would declare the mantle of progress totally embrace the tip of Jews. By no means in its wildest desires would Hamas have believed that raping and beheading Jews would flip them into progressive darlings, however right here we’re.
Will this trigger younger progressives to acknowledge the error of their ideology? Will they understand that their sudden existential concern for Palestinians once they cared nothing about them till it meant they may brazenly hate Jews, proves that they’re simply one other taste of haters, of authoritarians, of racists?
2024 gives the chance for the younger to interrupt away from their failed beliefs, the lies they inform themselves to fake they’re the great guys on the correct aspect of historical past when they’re no higher than their adversaries regardless of how fairly the ribbon with which they tie up their beliefs. However will they? Or will the inflection level be that their failure, their hatred, their simplistic irrationality, is staring them within the face they usually simply don’t give a rattling. They know who they hate and they’re going to hate each bit as a lot as they need to.
I had excessive hopes for 2024, that it will be the inflection level we would have liked to cease the downward spiral of hatred. Now, I’m not so certain.
Completely satisfied New Yr.
