Now, after a long life, I've come to understand how common it is for many basically nice, well meaning people to do terrible things in their lives.  When few — that is, on the micro-level — are involved, it may destroy families and communities.  When many do it, whole civilizations may be destroyed.  It is why, particularly on the macro-level, I care little about niceness.  As regards people I rely on outside my home — presidents, teachers, airline pilots, doctors, architects, investment advisers, my rabbi — I don't care fundamentally if I'd enjoy hanging out with them.  I care about their work product.

Many, on the other hand, care deeply about niceness.  They regularly get blinded by its superficiality and the destructiveness it may conceal.  They suffer — we all do — the consequences.

Not being naïve and led astray by niceness is an important rule of life.  It brings clarity to how one should approach, especially, the many nice folks in our lives now doing terrible things to our country.

I should also know something about the lack of relationship between niceness and goodness.  I used to be one of these nice American guys, a man who worked as a doctor.  Early in my career, I did some terrible things to many children.  I participated in the killing of dozens of innocent children through abortion.  It was a terrible thing to do to each individual child but also a terrible attack on a core value in America: the respect for the sanctity of human life.  I'd get a request to scan the pregnant woman in order for the abortionist to figure out the best means to end the life of the little boy or girl.  I, a nice American doctor, said nothing.  I did my job without thought of the moral or social implications.  I'm quite ashamed of this.

Things are much worse in our country now, decades later.  Half of America, tens of millions of basically nice folks are hell-bent on destroying all the core values of this wonderful country.  The wall has been breached, the foundation unmoored, the center given way, the abyss entered.  We watch each day as virtually every norm, tradition, custom and institution of America has been destroyed or is under powerful assault from many nice people. 

It is a tsunami of destruction.  For those of us not blinded by our Pravda-like media or in some government public school or university indoctrination camp, it is in plain, ugly sight.  Our greatest value of expansive individual liberty, our connection to God and the Bible, our respect for human life, our understanding of marriage, family norms, our meritocracy, our once respectable universities and public schools, our value of limited government, our basic freedoms of speech and religion, our rights to private property, our colorblind society, our police and military, our delight in sports and entertainment, our value of justice and law and order, and to top it off, our understanding of the nature of sex — all are under assault or destroyed by millions of nice and pleasant Americans.  Even many of our once respected, still nice, sweet, smiling doctors at our typical children's hospital are now mutilating children with chemicals or scalpels in the name of some pagan sexual cult.

My own precious, innocent four-year-old granddaughter (along with millions of other kids) is now being essentially abused in her kindergarten by very nice teachers and clergy.  Barely out of the womb, and now she is told the outrageous lie by these adults that a boy in her class is now a girl.  Another very nice clergyman down the street, who now wakes up each day to assign himself a pronoun, recently told the community he did a religious ceremony for the non- entity and delusion of a nonbinary human.  Millions of our nice fellow citizens have dragged us into the abyss of madness and destruction of American civilization.

We are in the midst of a maelstrom of destruction.  Great thinkers and writers like Victor Davis Hanson, Larry Arnn, Dennis Prager, Robert George, Jordan Peterson, Mark Levin, Heather Mac Donald, Tom Sowell, and the like have clarified the history and causes.  It began long ago in the radically secular and illiberal ideas that gave rise to the French enlightenment, then later mixed with those of Marx and onto America, where it has now exploded out of academia and into all our institutions, from the Democrat party to our corporations, media, schools, non-orthodox churches and synagogues, and even the Boy Scouts.

And what this has done is taken millions of nice Americans and cut them from the roots that nourished their culture and world view.  It has cut them off from our Judeo-Christian and liberal roots, built and developed over millennia.  A nice guy like me can blithely move kids along the conveyor belt to death when all around me is the anti-American message that God is dead and the kid in there is not a child, just a choice.  In the same way, the nice clergyman and teacher abusing my four-year-old grandchild can cheerfully do so because they now swim in a Marxist/Progressive/Democrat culture of lies. 

I, luckily, had a dear sister who pulled me from the abyss, reintroduced me to America, and allowed me to understand what this great country is about. I heard and read the great patriot and scholar Denis Prager on talk radio.  He reintroduced me to our Bible and the core values of American culture.  He introduced me to many other living brilliant and wise men and women, like those noted above, who clarified what is warring on us.  Among many other things, I regained my cultural bearings and realigned my moral compass.

I know again what it is to be an American and a Jew in this great land.  It does not mean killing baby boys and girls.  It does not mean participating in the lie that boys can become girls.  It does not mean supporting the poisonous ideology of American Marxism that has infected every institution.

It also means understanding that many nice people in our neighborhoods and nation are in essence doing something terrible.  They are, sadly, our enemies in the war between Americanism and Marxist/Progressivism.  We need to do the hard and uncomfortable work of looking behind the niceness and fight for this precious land.

Image: Pashi via Pixabay, Pixabay License.