Our Vulgar Self Congratulatory Existence

Wednesday, October 29, 2025

Right now, in California, they are worried about peanut oil in the fried chicken.  No, seriously, restaurants now, by law, have to have menus that read like ingredient lists lest a customer encounter some unwanted food to which they are allergic – and California is quite proud of how civilized they are.  Yet, in Sudan, real massacres, not pretend ones like everyone has been on a high horse about in Gaza, are happening.  In Sudan entire villages are being invaded and people are being openly massacred by the thousands.  So large and so brutal is the killing that the human remains and massive blood stains on the soil are visible from space.  This being reported just two weeks after we looked at the mass killing of Christians in Nigeria.  Helping people with food allergies is fine, but dear Lord, acting like it is some sort of major moral victory when humans are being slaughtered en masse in other parts of the world is just warped.

Africa has long been a brutal and ugly place.  Solutions are not easy to come by and those that have been tried have proven ineffective.  I do not see a near term future where the problem is solved – but it won’t ever be solved if the first world gets all uppity about minor things like food allergies while the slaughter continues virtually unreported.

What is really bothersome here is that we in the supposedly enlightened first world act as if such brutality and inhumanity is somehow beneath us or beyond us.  We ignore it because we do not want to face our own capability for the same. And yet it was less than a century ago when one seemingly enlightened western nation tried to eliminate the Jews, entirely. The veneer of civility that we enjoy is just that, a veneer.  And things like the assassination of Charlie Kirk, or the attempted assassinations of President Trump illustrate just how thin the veneer actually is.  Trying to keep human barbarity bottled up in a few hellhole regions and ignoring it is not a solution, it is at best a postponement – as illustrated by 9-11.

We cannot kill this barbarity simply because the very effort would loose the same barbarity in us.  What we need, desperately, is a means to cleanse the human heart and soul of the evil that propels this violence and slaughter.  True civility, true humanity is not a matter of governance or mere moral compliance.  No veneer is thick enough or strong enough to last.  We need radical change – down to our very core.

This video is lovely – a gentleman at Cambridge reading from The Voyage of The Dawn Treader about the undragoning of Eustace.  He picks up the narrative not as Aslan appears to the dragon Eustace to turn him back into a boy, but as Eustace discovers his dragon nature.  The key to changing our nature on such fundamental levels starts with recognizing just how barbaric and awful our nature truly is.

The brutality and inhumanity of sub-Saharan Africa is not beneath or beyond us – it is us, revealed.  The key to ending it starts with looking at and accepting the revelation in all its full ugliness.  Would that we could and did.