"Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere between bitter division and blasé complacency."

Peggy Noonan writes in the Wall Street Journal,

I was traveling this week for work, in Europe.

When we arrived at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, passport control was closed down. Many hundreds of people milled about confusedly. An airline worker said two unattended bags had been found and security personnel were on the scene. Officials might have to explode the bags where they are. Will there be any warning? Yes, I was told, they’ll tell us before and we’ll hear it. Does this sort of thing happen often? “A few times a day,” an attendant said.

There was no air of alarm, and everyone around us was pleasant. After 35 minutes passport control opened, without an explosion. The attitude was that this was par for the course, just another day at the office.

Two hours after I got to my hotel, word came of a terror attack three blocks away, on the Champs Élysées. I asked the woman at the desk for directions and she said, in low and measured terms, “I’m sorry madame, there has been a terrorist occurrence. You should not go there.” I said, “Yes, I’d like to go see it.” She brightened: “In that case, go left, left, then final left!”

...My editor discerns this theme: Perhaps there is a happy medium somewhere between bitter division and blasé complacency.

Read more here.

What do we owe to the Syrian boy on the beach in Turkey?

Noah Rothman takes a look at Commentary at the complacency of the West and America to the plight of the people of northern Africa and the Middle East:

In the years that followed Obama’s shortsighted decision to abandon Syria (and the entire region, it would turn out) to violence, Europe would find itself in the midst of a refugee crisis. A great human tide has descended upon the continent as teeming masses of Middle Easterners and North Africans displaced by warfare take flight into Europe. The Czech Republic and Hungary, finding themselves on the frontlines of the crushing mass of terrorized Syrians, have taken emergency measures. Prague revealed this week that it simply lacked the manpower to detain those refugees racing for Northern European havens. Budapest has shut down rail lines and has created de facto detention centers in order to cope with the crisis. Italy is prepared to re-impose border controls at Germany’s request.

...Assad can only sustain his terrible war with the aid of foreign allies, and his most valuable benefactors are the mullahs in Tehran. On Wednesday, the final piece fell into place that would ensure the implementation of a nuclear accord with Iran that rewards the Islamic Republic with $150 billion in sanctions relief, as well as the eventual lifting of all weapons and missile embargos on the terrorism-sponsoring regime. “The Obama administration is hopeful that the Iranians will use the windfall to build schools, hospitals, and roads. But there’s an excellent chance that at least a healthy chunk of it will go to two U.S.-designated terrorist entities,” wrote the regional experts Michael Weiss and Nancy Youssef. “[T]he Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps-Quds Force (IRGC-QC) and its proxy Lebanese Hezbollah, both of which are now in effect running Assad’s scorched-earth warfare.”

...The Syrian boy who washed up on a Turkish beach wearing a bright red t-shirt and shorts on Wednesday will not be the last. He is asleep now, and his suffering is over. Ours endures, and we must bear it. America and the West own a portion of the torment that characterized his short time on Earth. In our comfort, we allowed this great human catastrophe to metastasize. At the very least, it is incumbent upon us to look upon the face of the agony we permitted. Only then will it be possible to one day steel ourselves to the unpleasant task at hand. Only then will we eventually come to terms with the bloodletting we have abetted and to one day resolve to put an end to it. We owe that to that boy. Don’t look away.

read more here.

Have you thought about turning off the TV?

Ace of Spades is thinking about quitting watching t.v. I say go for it, Ace. The only t.v. I watch is at the gym with the sound turned off. I switch it to Fox News and watch the closed captioning in between sets. I agree with all these things Ace is saying today:

If I write down all the shows I watch, I think I'll be embarrassed and sad to see how many hours I sit as a voluntary, unmoving, passive spectator, watching other people perform Shows and other people perform in Sports and other people doing things.

Literally doing anything is more worthy than sitting in front of the Idiot Box to be anaesthetized and hypnotized by stupefying beams of leftism.

There is a reason this country is in terrible shape. It's because it's people have become slack in their thinking. Lazy. Stupid.

And right in front of me is a big 47" rectangular pill that makes people complacent, fat, unhealthy, dumb, disconnected from humanity, and disinterested in their own futures, nevermind their country's.

TV is compromise, TV is defeat, TV is acceptance, TV is mediocrity.

And it's an industry held almost entirely in Enemy Hands, by the idiot descendants of carnival-barkers and pornographers who just happened to realize that every new technology which permits people to live less life will be a financial winner.

We can free ourselves and maybe, even, free this country.

We can Kill The Messenger.

So my idea is to start, as a movement, boycotting TV almost entirely, picking up, get this, new skills and hobbies and interests to fill the time we would otherwise be spending in front of the Radioactive Drug of the television screen.

Joining book clubs. Going on walks with our (get this) spouses and kids. Even doing "nerdy" stuff like bird watching, which, quite frankly, seems a whole lot more vital and vigorous than watching the shit they've thrown together to assassinate our brains tonight.

Read more here.