The Battlefield

Anthony Esolen
There's not one sane person in this saga of sadness, recklessness, hedonism, and practical atheism. All quite mad; and therefore the same lunatics male and female who bathe in a sewer must “intervene,” with more intrusive, extensive, and insane measures to “protect” jungle women from jungle men. It occurs to no one that decent people do not need such measures, because they have not turned their parks into jungles, their clinics into morgues, and their schools into brothels.

Man cannot endure much chaos. Plato noted it long ago; democracy degenerates into the misrule of the passions, and the amnesiac cries of the mob. Then comes the tyrant, who has been stirring up the disorder behind the scenes, and he says, “Trust in me.” He may let them pursue their stupid pleasures all the more; chaos is his feed.
Anthony Esolen:
Do we wish to go to war? It does not matter whether we wish it or not. The war is here. We can no longer harbor any pleasant illusions about it. We cannot pat ourselves for some wonderful moral insight, saying that we oppose snuffing out a baby's life, while we shrug as the walls of the natural and God-ordained family are battered in. We cannot hug ourselves for being “tolerant” of confusion on parade, while confessing ourselves conveniently incapable of doing anything about the flood of filth that meets the eyes of our children every day.

The war is here, and there is nothing for it but to pray and to fight. Faith, hope, and charity itself demand no less.
We cannot ignore the darkness and we must not lest we be engulfed by it without even being aware. However, we cannot ignore and neglect the beauty that remains. The family we love. The wonder of a little child. The beauty of flowers. The valid Sacraments still there. And precisely for their sake that we must not ignore the darkness.