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Don't look back | page 1, 2
It was the pain that caused me to change. Every day, after Betty's murder, the pain spoke to me: "You cannot stay in this place. If you don't move, you will die." It's fear that normally keeps us in our personal grooves. But now I was caught between that fear and a force that proved greater than fear. It was pain that inspired me to overcome inertia and escape what I felt was spiritual death -- that caused me, in the end, to change. David Horowitz David Horowitz's column appears on the News site every other Monday.
My e-mail interlocutor's second question was unexpected, and even more perplexing than his first: "Do you ever feel that you are wasting your breath? Do you think that truth will ever matter? No matter what you prove or disprove, in the end the truth will remain in the shadows of what people want to hear and want to believe." I agree more than I care to with this observation. It is the human wish to be told lies that keeps us as primitive morally and socially as we are. But stoic realism is, after all, what being a conservative is about. It is about accepting the absolute limits that life places on human hope. One could define the left as just the opposite. The obstinate, compulsive, destructive belief in the fantasy of change in the hope of a human redemption. I have watched my friends on the left, whose ideas created an empire of inhumanity, survive the catastrophe of their schemes and go on to unexpected triumph, ignoring the ashes of their ideological defeat. Forced to witness the collapse of everything they had once dreamed of and worked to achieve, they have emerged unchastened and unchanged in pursuit of their destructive illusions. And they have been rewarded for their misdeeds with a cultural cachet and unprecedented influence in the country most responsible for the worldwide defeat of their misguided hopes. I cannot explain this dystopian paradox except by agreeing with my interlocutor that politics is indeed irrational; and that socialism is a wish as deep as any religious faith. I do not know that the truth must necessarily remain in the shadows, as he writes. But I am persuaded that a lie grounded in human desire is too powerful for mere reason to kill.
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