Hoping for the Worst II

The Catholic tradition has always insisted on loving the poor in real, not theoretical, ways. So it has, right from the beginning, pronounced a blessing on giving alms in, for instance, the Sermon on the Mount. It’s all well and good to have a plan for social uplift and improvement of the lot of the poor and job creation for the poor and long term theories about reducing poverty. Just don’t, in the middle of all that abstraction, forget to take care of the poor man who is sitting right in front of your face.

This was the fatal mistake of most radical leftism. It reached the point where the actual physical poor man sitting right there in front of the lefty’s face was less real than the abstract Triumphant Proletarian of the Future. There was a famous instance in which one 19th century Lefty was walking with a friend when a beggar approached. The friend reached into his pocket for a few coins to give the beggar when the Lefty stopped him, saying “Don’t delay the Revolution!” When your abstract theories lead you to wish and do evil against flesh and blood people right now, your system is now evil and it’s time for you to repent, rethink, and return to God. Because you’ve reached the stage where you are now saying “Let us do evil that good may come of it.”

I mention this because I remember a time (how very long ago it seems now), when “being patriotic” meant “loving your country” and desiring what is good for your neighbor. This meant your real, concrete, actual flesh and blood neighbor. And being patriotic, being an extension of the second greatest commandment to our borders, was not intended as a rejection of the love of foreign neighbors, but as a sort of dress rehearsal for loving *all* neighbors as our Lord commanded.

But in the bizarre alchemy of the craziness that is Movement Conservatism, patriotism no longer means that. Having taken on some weirdly Trotskyite and Lefty tendencies to cherish the ideal over the real, Movement Conservatism now exalts lunatics who think it patriotic to say (I am not making this up) the only chance we have as a country is for Osama bin Laden to detonate a major weapon on our soil.

Note the similarity of the logic. The lunatics have an obsession with illegal immigrants. Their hope and prayer: bring on the mass death and don’t delay the Revolution! Our only hope is that great evil be done so that good may come of it!

Remember: *these* are the people who excommunicated as “unpatriotic” those who said the Iraq War did not meet just war criteria and the use of torture was both sinful and un-American. These are the self-appointed arbiters of True Patriotism[TM]. These lunatics who *hope* for the slaughter of millions of innocent Americans. Down such roads does the insanity of consequentialism lead.

Barking mad.