Dan Flynn, a regular essayist at AmSpec, offers some troubling observations about people and relationships in the wake of the heroin OD of the actor Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
It is easy to talk about loving your neighbor as an abstraction, or believing the words of the John Lennon song
Imagine.
Flynn talks about people reacting to the death of an actor who was a junkie who left 3 children fatherless. He comments on the strange reactions of people because the man was an actor and celebrity.
It reminded me a little of the swoon the world went into on the death of Princess Di.
http://spectator.org/articles/57711/philip-seymour-hoffman-our-imaginary-friend
And that made me think about the extraordinary essay on Universalist leftist insanity and resentment of family/tribe/country nationalism. Why the State of Israel has become so reviled in the 1st world when all the Jews are doing is holding on to a place to survive as an ethnic group persecuted almost to extinction.
Traditional society is built on old time foundations and relationships. What do we build on Universalist sentiments except a unfounded sense of superiority and a rejection of past traditions? Has the society become unmoored because it is still in adolescent rebellion? I surely don’t know, but I do know the continuing importance of family, community and nation. I am not prepared to be a Universalist dreamer.
http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-universalist-holocaust.html