There are lines that are not crossed. Civilized humans do not
cross them. Unless they are “Woke.” Op-ed.
There is an expression in rabbinic literature: Mitzvah goreret Mitzvah; Aveirah goreret Aveirah. One who habitually does good deeds finds that opportunities arise in his or her life orbit to do even more good deeds. And one who sins with frequency finds that somehow more sins come his or her way.
With each new societal outrage, each breakdown in Western core civilization, yet even newer and more obscene outrages arise. Did you see video of the disgusting animals who recently followed United States Senator Kyrsten Sinema into a bathroom, shouting at her from the other side of her toilet stall? What civilized person does that?
A person who cannot allow another human being the dignity of entering a toilet stall in private is disgusting. Not because of politics but because of a basic fundamental lack of civilization. There are lines that are not crossed. Civilized humans do not cross them. Pigs do.
And so it goes for those Woke Intersectionalists who followed Sen. Sinema to the toilet. Their behavior was and is disgusting. I watch that minute of YouTube video, and I hear my Mom of blessed memory saying: “Some people just never learned manners.”
The Left has evolved, particularly in the years since Obama broke down core aspects of our culture and civilization. He did that by empowering a Snowflake Generation to claim a life of Perpetual Entitlement to safe spaces, demanding trigger warnings of lurking microaggressions, with his trademark nose-in-the-air arrogance that anything goes for the Left.
Maybe the problem even stems back to the very word: Entitlement, a word against which I have been crusading the past few days. Entitlement? No one is “entitled.” Not to welfare. Not to food stamps. Not to housing. Not to break into a country by flouting its borders and immigration laws.
Mexicans and Guatemalans are not “entitled” to break into America. Ethiopians and Somalians are not “entitled” to sneak into Israel.
The current degradation of our culture and civilization is epitomized by Colin Kaepernick, an American Zero who, because he could throw a football well — the only thing he can do better than other people — decided to kneel in front of 50,000 or more people while the American national anthem was being played.
People have died for that song. That very song’s message is why that fellow was paid millions of dollars in some years for the skill of throwing a football — and little else. With his football career all but finished, he now is paid millions more for endorsing a pair of sneakers and for allowing the Ben & Jerry’s Israel haters to use his name on an ice cream.
Frankly, Kaepernick indeed should kneel in public — not as a manifestation of his politics but in a genuflection of humble obeisance and gratitude on his knees before 50,000 people in the stadium who despise him and his politics but have paid to watch him throw a football while he still could.
Think of all the abuses against our very civilization to which we have grown accustomed since Obama and His Ilk came to reign.
– In America: Maxine Waters telling the troglodytes who respect her that they should get into the faces of their political opponents.
-People harassing Mitch McConnell and his wife at a diner.
-People driving Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her family out of a restaurant. People harassing Florida’s then-attorney-general Pam Bondi at a movie theater.
-People almost killing Sen. Rand Paul and his wife as they left a White House event.
-People pounding to break down the door of the U.S. Supreme Court, induced to madness by a manifestly perjurious witness aiming to destroy a good and devout Catholic man in front of his wife and daughters.
-And now people rowing on boats to harass a United States Senator who lives on a house boat when he reposes in D.C.
-And filthy pigs following a United States Senator — a Democrat liberal, yet — to her bathroom stall to harass her for refusing to follow the extreme left of their “progressive” agenda.
These times have been very sad to experience and to watch. Conservative anger did not erupt ex nihilo.
Israel has seen such outrages, too: Nightly vulgar public tumults and disruptively loud demonstrations for two and more years outside the private residence of the prime minister. A woman disrobing at the Knesset menorah.
Breakdowns in civility and common courtesy that we would expect, frankly, of lesser, of primitive cultures and civilizations.
And all of it defended by the Left as free expressions of “democracy.”
The Mediacracy of Hypocrisy like to portray conservatives in bad lights. If ten thousand conservatives march, but one spits on the floor or fails to tie his shoes, that is the next day’s page-one photograph. Just think back to the Left Media race to judgment against Nick Sandmann, that sweet Catholic high school kid from Covington in northeastern Kentucky.
But the reality is that conservatives are good people, very fine people. It is a core value of conservatism to live and let live. Yes, to advocate and to seek to persuade, but with an underlying laissez-faire recognition that reasonable people may — and should — differ because it is wrong to believe that one side should have the right to impose its beliefs in other people’s heads.
Really, only dictatorships see election results where the winner gets 99 percent of the vote, while the losing one percent get hanged the next day.
Yet we do have our pigs. That’s all, folks.
Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer is Contributing Editor at The American Spectator, adjunct professor of law at two prominent Southern California law schools, Senior Rabbinic Fellow at the Coalition for Jewish Values, rabbi of Young Israel of Orange County, California, and has held prominent leadership roles in several national rabbinic and other Jewish organizations.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
(Arutz 7).