RUTHIE BLUM: A NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTION TO REMEMBER
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=6859
The one thing common to all New Year’s resolutions is that they are based on the fantasy of a brighter future. Though the aim to lose weight or make a career move is neither unreasonable nor necessarily unattainable, the reason it involves fantasy is twofold.
In the first place, the unconscious, underlying goal of those determined to be thinner or more affluent is to value who they are and what they have. Rather than resolving to feel contentment, however, they vow to correct the things about themselves that they believe constitute the obstacles to their well-being. Thus, even when they do manage to meet their ostensible objective of dropping a dress size or earning a higher salary, they tend to be left with their original malaise. Hence, the annual ritual of repeating the same resolutions.
Secondly, the decision to exact change on a certain calendar date is the stuff that dreams are made of. Real transformation, like genuine intent, comes from within. While external factors may influence internal ones, they cannot serve as a substitute. Furthermore, satisfaction with one’s body or job is the result of peace of mind, not the cause of it.
It is little wonder, then, that New Year’s resolutions are rarely kept, other than in the pages of diaries. No harm done; there’s always next year.
Sadly, this approach has been applied to the international arena, with dire consequences. This is because the thought process that drives political resolutions is increasingly being based on false premises espoused by Western democracies.
Herein lies the great global divide between the forces of freedom and those of tyranny. The former think that the obstacle to a better, safer world is the absence of peace with their detractors, and resolve to change their own ways in order to rectify the situation. It is thus that the United States and Europe on Monday resumed negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, and that Israel let 26 Palestinian terrorists out of jail early Tuesday, as part of a series of prisoner releases to which it committed in the framework of “peace talks.”
The latter, in contrast, do not engage in self-flagellation. They are too busy maiming and killing others, in a concerted effort to grab or hold on to power.
Indeed, neither Iran nor the Palestinian Authority gives a damn about peace. The aim and resolve of each is to obliterate the enemy. The only view shared by the West and the Middle East at this point, then, is that the West is flawed and has to make up for it through concessions.
This is as tragic as it is treacherous, and not only for Westerners. Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians and Lebanese (to name but a few) have the daily experience of living — and dying — in terror and often in hunger, to boot. It is what they know. It is also what they can expect in 2014.
Democratic countries have been in a serious crisis for a long time now, precisely for not valuing their own virtues. This created a spiritual vacuum that became easily filled with far-Left ideology perpetrated by the intelligentsia.
With academia and the media happily stepping up to undermine the fabric of the very societies that grant them the absolute freedom to do so, it didn’t take much for radical Islamists to gain both sympathy and political headway among the chattering classes, particularly in Europe.
This has led to the kind of distortion of reality characteristic of cults. Though otherwise intelligent people join voluntarily, they soon morph into automatons, subdued through mind control.
When ideas — no matter how counterintuitive or clearly wrong — are reiterated long enough by friend and foe alike, they can be harder to shake than even the most seductive guru. How else could feminists in New York defend female circumcision in Gaza? How else could professors in Tel Aviv back British boycotts of Israeli academics?
But not everyone is drinking the Kool-Aid. And some who tried it received an antidote in the form of facts on the ground — or missiles in the air — which were too blatant to ignore. It is a group that must be encouraged to expand, if we want our values to survive the current assault on them.
It is this that we would do well to remember as we enter the new year. We should also make a resolution to stop fantasizing about the good to come. We need to focus, instead, on the good that already exists, and be prepared to preserve and protect it from those who are acting on behalf of its demise.
Ruthie Blum is the author of “To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama, and the ‘Arab Spring.'”
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