David Letterman's recent outrageous display of poor taste and insensitivity regarding Sarah Palin's daughter, Willow, and the liberal press' defense of it, points to a larger cultural issue -- our nation has grown hard of heart.
Civility has been bartered for crudeness, courtesy for contempt, and politeness for self-aggrandisement. In the end, hardness of heart leads to a complete disregard for the human person and reduces him to nothing more than a joke's punchline -- or much worse.
Consider the incident involving the teens who attacked another teen this week, beat her up, and cut and torched her hair. Or the unconscionable murder of the Holocaust museum security guard, Stephen Johns, by James von Brunn.
While we find such things shocking, we ought not. These are the predictable behaviors of a people who has lost sight of God and the moral law. Anything, and any one, becomes simply the means to an end -- our own narcissistic interest. Left unchecked, hardness of heart becomes a cancer of the soul that leads from disregard for our neighbor to disdain toward our neighbor to the destruction of our neighbor. It's the continuum of a degenerating moral conscience.
People of faith must push back. We must work to preserve all that is God-honoring in our culture and work even harder to restore that which has been lost. Through legal and legitimate means, with the love of God in our heart and the conviction of His Holy Spirit in our soul, we must do what we can to stem the tide and to renew a reasoned order. Our action and our witness can do much to affect the tenor of our times.
In a letter written to the Bishops in March of this year, Pope Benedict XVI said this, "The real problem at this moment of our hisotry is that God is disappearing from the human horizon, and, with the dimming of the light which comes from God, humanity is losing its bearings with increasingly evident destructive effects."
But the Holy Father, in that same letter, points us to the solution: "In our days, when in vast areas of the world the faith is in danger of dying out like a flame which no longer has fuel, the overriding priority is to make God present in this world and to show men and women the way to God."
The Holy Father clearly outlines our duty and our responsibility. As believers, we have a job to do. May we have the guts to do it.
