Today, while Apple announces marvelous and wonderful technological advances, ISIS uses those advances to stab, bomb, shoot, run over, and destroy the very civilization that creates those advances.
While trying to integrate these dichotomous happenings, there are those defending the barbarous actions of terrorists and the unevolved religion that spawns the terrorism, seemingly ignorant of their suicidal “tolerance.”
What becomes of Western Civilization should the terrorists succeed? No commerce. No travel. No walking at night. No fashion. No art. No music.
Death. Isolation. Tribalism. Fear.
And yet, in the face of a completely devoted enemy, the West cannot muster the energy to defend their love of something like the iPhone; something that completely changed the culture and democratized information.
This generation seems unwilling or incapable of defending their own way of life; their own belief system. But people have to believe something in order to defend something. The ISIS terrorists believe something and it animates their actions. Their actions are not “senseless violence.” Their actions serve a purpose. There is power in the strength of their convictions and that power is translated into violence.
Do our young people believe in anything besides some mushy idea that “all ideology is evil” and causes people to do “stupid things.” So fighting for freedom of thought and expression, or even fighting for the means to deliver those thoughts and expressions, like the iPhone, would be a waste?
Two worlds are colliding and yet one side, even after repeatedly losing lives and freedoms, refuses to fight. They refuse to even acknowledge the fight, or name it, little less engage in it.
On Twitter today, while watching the terrorism and technology tweets fly by, I wondered at it all. There will come a time, sooner than later, I expect, when many who blithely tweet bromides about terrorism and homilies about technology will come face to face personally with the former and lose the latter.
They’ll wonder where it all went wrong. They won’t know because they’ll no longer have access to their Twitter feeds and can’t remember the way it used to be. There will just be hazy memories of self-congratulatory feelings of open-mindedness.
“At least I wasn’t racist,” they’ll whisper from their dark, very energy-efficient stone age homes.