I’ve written several times about changes that have been troubling – changes that, on the surface, seem trivial, like the closing of the circus. In that piece, I mourned the “furnishings of my childhood” that had disappeared.
More distressing is the change of a moral code in which I grew up and with which I have lived my adult life – a code that recognized the sovereignty of a higher power, that celebrated self-evident truths, that honored personal responsibility, that flourished in democracy and capitalism.
These values are being shunned in the name of ridding the system of injustices. There is no doubt that our nation has an alarming past, and that, more than 100 years after the Civil War, a large number of our citizens have been marginalized.
But, unfortunately, our dedication to erasing injustice and poverty have resulted in greater injustice and poverty of the spirit.
I believe that much of what our nation is suffering is the result of good intentions. We have not learned the basic premise for helping others, that there is a thin line between helping and enabling, and that taking away responsibility for bad behavior begets more bad behavior. At the extreme, intended good morphs into evil.
We see injustice and, determined to eradicate it, fail to foster justice at all. And so, we release criminals back onto the streets where they commit more crimes. We open our shops to shoplifters. We memorialize criminals and prosecute law enforcement. The “victimized” become the victimizers, and bystanders and shop keepers become the victims. The intended good has produced evil.
Our nation is experiencing a rise in its young people, even children, who believe they were born into the wrong gender. Our good intentions to help have created a rise in the number of children and teens who express “gender confusion.” We dress up our attempts to help them in hyperbolic language: we offer them, “gender-affirming care,” pseudonyms for both administering hormones and even mutilating surgeries. Their parents, either those who find a perverse status in parenting a “transgender child” or who are told by “experts” that denying the medical treatments will most certainly result in suicide, agree to the treatments. Those who resist are labeled “child abusers.”
I have read several articles by young women who identified, for a time, as males. Now in the process of “detransitioning,” they recount their experiences with counselors who never counseled, but pushed for medical procedures, doctors who never questioned their desires for surgery, and a life in a new gender that did not bring the desired happiness. Now, they mourn the children they will never have.
The intended good has morphed into evil.
Our concern over “back-alley abortions” resulting in great harm to pregnant women has evolved into a desire to make abortion available without question or guidelines, even through the ninth month of pregnancy. It has evolved into believing that pregnancy is a illness, a cancer that has wormed its way into a woman’s body. We walk the streets with placards proclaiming. “My body, my choice.” We have moved from the slogan “Legal, safe, and rare” to advertising and celebrating our abortions.
We are at an impasse, between those who believe the mother’s body is sacred and those who believe it is the child’s body that is sacred. We ignore that every woman has a personal responsibility, the option to “choose” to avoid pregnancy; we celebrate termination of life rather than advocating for prevention of pregnancy.
The intended good has morphed into evil.
We ignore and cover up political corruption. We parade men dressed as women during children’s story hour.
I wonder, has our society moved so far away from the values of personal responsibility, appropriate consequences for violating the law, and recognition that children deserve our protection, that we must continue on this path? Can we not learn the lesson that we must teach the needy, to quote a cliché, to fish, rather than continually filling their buckets with another fisherman’s catch?
When I have expressed concern, even despair, about the state of our society, a friend of mine has reminded me of the story of Joseph.
Joseph, whose tale is related in Genesis, suffers blatant injustice. As a young man, the favorite of his father, he is sold into Egyptian slavery by his envious brothers. His trials are great, but because the God of Israel watches over him and rewards his sterling character, he rises to become a favorite of Pharoah with great powers of his own.
Egypt prospers, while Israel is stricken by famine. And so, his brothers travel to Egypt to beg help from Pharoah; there, they encounter the brother they had betrayed.
And Joseph forgives them. He can look back over the years of his sojourn in Egypt and understand that it has been personally profitable, but that it also gives an opportunity to rescue his homeland, his family, from the famine.
And so he says, “You meant it for evil, but God meant it for good.”
We did not, perhaps, intend that our society’s attempts to help should evolve into evil, but evil they have become.
But God …