How did we end up in a world where human beings justify cold-blooded murder or where innocent hostages are seen as being on equal footing with criminals who are imprisoned?
It wasn’t so long ago that nearly everyone knew the difference between good and evil, order and lawlessness, or had the ability to identify depravity. Sadly, this is no longer true.
We are seeing two things, in particular, interfere with society’s capacity to properly judge events – something that should be relatively easy to determine but is not – because politics and ideology have, in many cases, superseded what we refer to as a moral compass.
The values, principles, and guiding ethics, which come from the highest standards – usually the scriptures, which serve as the basis of our laws – are meant to give us a proper framework as to what is acceptable and what is not.
But what happens when misplaced loyalties or the need to conform with others in order to be viewed as one of them makes us see through a very dim lens, unable to make out what should be crystal clear?
That is the beginning of danger, and we are now in the throes of it. The British daily newspaper, The Guardian, ran a piece that illustrates this very issue. Describing the release of a Palestinian prisoner, it detailed how, according to family members, he looked like a dead body, since he had lost so much weight.
Palestinian terrorists compared to innocent Israeli hostages
Citing “difficult conditions and inadequate food in prison,” one might have been led to believe they were reading about one of the Gaza hostages. (“Freed hostages, released terrorists seen as equals,” The Jerusalem Post (October 17).
Drawing the similarity of their “emotional reunions” with their families, the horrific facts of their incarceration, whether murder, terror acts, rape, or other such monstrous crimes, are purposely obscured.
This helps to create a level playing field, designed to neatly place everything into the box of relativism where knowledge, truth, and morality are not absolute perspectives.
In that way, everything can be judged on a basis that is changeable, depending on circumstances, current societal mores, and a deliberate shift to manipulate the public into whatever the puppet masters want them to believe.
The once black and white, wrong from right is seen as too decisive for the tastes of an evolving world system. Perhaps, it hits too close to home, knowing that you or someone you know could be judged as embracing evil.
Because when you see hundreds of thousands take to the streets of major cities, advocating for Hamas terrorists, it becomes obvious that masses have been affected by a concerted effort to erase our moral compasses.
The political ideology of “woke” has fallen into this category. Those who have decided to champion the Palestinian cause have, by natural adoption, aligned themselves with a heinous, barbaric terror group that lacks all morals and conscience.
That they could invade peaceful communities inhabited by innocent families – burn, torture, mutilate, decapitate, rape, and brutalize them – says everything you need to know about the demonic nature of these combatants who used drugs in order to turn off any leftover semblance of humanity they may have possessed.
Conversely, those who support them, protest on their behalf, and take up their cudgels are not necessarily under the influence of substances. They are, instead, hypnotized by the lure of the insurgence.
Somewhat romanticized, revolt and uprising have, throughout the centuries, been known to draw in those seeking a bit of excitement and exhilaration.
For any whose lives lack purpose, direction, or meaning, becoming part of an organized protest can provide a sense of making a difference in a world that is filled with injustice.
Yet rather than dissect the inequities in order to understand their cause and determine the best way to help, many young people choose to join an already existing movement, naively believing in its legitimacy.
Blindly following along, moral truths are buried in favor of lending validity to a cause that would otherwise be easily rejected and forcefully condemned by anyone who has the ability to think rationally.
And that is what’s missing these days. In truth, it doesn’t take much thought to come to the conclusion that violence, as a means to accomplish one’s personal aspirations, is always wrong and always evil.
When hardened prisoners, who have taken the lives of innocents, are compared to people taken against their will for no good reason other than their ethnicity, then you know that a moral compass is nowhere to be found.
The great blessing about having a working conscience is that it serves as a source of protection for each one of us, allowing us to accurately discern what constitutes goodness and also determine when an immoral line has been crossed.
Without that ability, it’s like having lost all sense of feeling, so that when your skin touches a scalding hot pan, you cannot feel the pain or know that you have suffered severe damage to your body.
Likewise, our souls must have a mechanism of self-defense, because, without it, we are at the mercy of evildoers who will inflict their depravity upon an unsuspecting public who won’t know what hit them until the damage is already done.
Yes, times change, and the differences between today and even 100 years ago are astounding. So, we needn’t go back thousands of centuries to try to rationalize why we must be willing to move along with a fast-paced changing world.
Nonetheless, we must also analyze the efficacy and continued virtue of the laws that dictate what constitutes morality and immorality. Those precepts, bestowed upon us by the Almighty, were meant to endure over the passage of time.
Prohibitions such as not stealing, not committing murder, and not violating your neighbor are eternal values that, when honored, protect all of society, promoting mutual respect and maintaining the God-given principles we were blessed to inherit.
To suddenly challenge that code of moral guidelines in order to accommodate an agenda, that stands in opposition to these time-tested, incorruptible values is a jaded attempt to overrule the wisdom of our Creator.
It is, in effect, the ultimate dismissal of goodness and the sure path towards our destruction. The only way back is to acknowledge our human limitations and realize the necessity of having a moral compass, without which we are doomed to extinction.
The writer is a former Jerusalem elementary and middle school principal. She is also the author of Mistake-Proof Parenting, available on Amazon, based on the time-tested wisdom found in the Book of Proverbs.