Thoughts on Marriage: A Post-Wedding Dispatch

 

I write this week as a very different man than I was when writing my last column. Then, I was merely engaged; now, after the single greatest week of my life culminated in the single greatest day and night of my life, I am married.

I am filled with immense, overwhelming gratitude. My wife and I are blessed with wonderful family and loyal friends — in America and worldwide. We are surrounded by those who love and care for us, and we do not want material comforts. Perhaps most important, we are anchored by our Judaism and strive to live lives — and, God-willing, build a family — rooted in a particular meaning and purpose, and guided by a particular set of values and customs. Even at the very beginning of our lifelong journey together, we, therefore, already have everything we truly need.

Unfortunately, marriage these days is something of a countercultural phenomenon. According to a 2020 Pew Research survey, the percentage of married 23- to 38-year-old Americans steadily decreases by generation: 81% for the Silent Generation, 61% for baby boomers, 53% for Gen X, and 44% for millennials. The percentage of unmarried Americans 15 years or older has risen from 23% in 1950 to 34% in 2022.

No one should expect Gen Z to stem the tide, either. According to a Thriving Center of Psychology survey, 41% of Gen Z men and a whopping 52% of Gen Z women believe that marriage is an “outdated tradition.” Alas, what else would we expect from a generation hopelessly addicted to Chinese TikTok spyware and indoctrinated by left-wing activist teachers to think of the nuclear family as “patriarchal” and “repressive”?

Millennials and Gen Z are the “participation trophy” generations: They are the ones who came of age receiving trophies and accolades not for being victorious or otherwise triumphant, but for simply showing up and playing. “Second place is just the first place loser,” NASCAR legend Dale Earnhardt once said; “everyone is always a winner,” respond the cosseted brats of Gen Z and Gen Y (millennials).

America has raised successive generations to believe demonstrably untrue things: Every person is of equal worth (not in the true sense that we are all God’s creations, but in the untrue sense that we are all of equal acumen, skills and so forth); every culture and lifestyle is of equal dignity (including whether to marry and whether to raise children); and the only person who truly matters is  “me”  (and not one’s parents, grandparents, community members, countrymen, coreligionists and so forth).

In short, we have raised successive generations to reject the meritocratic, values-based and sacrificial lifestyle of yesteryear for the uber-egalitarian, nihilistic and solipsistic lifestyle flaunted by today’s elites. We have replaced the wisdom of traditional Judaism and Christianity with the moral relativism of the “Mystery Passage” from Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” We have replaced the duty and altruism of the Greatest Generation — those who stormed the beaches of Normandy and risked life and limb for God, family and country — with Ayn Rand’s “Virtue of Selfishness.”

No wonder, then, that marriage rates have been declining for so long. The very essence of the marital relationship — the fusing of two into one, the subordinating of the individual to the couple, learning to approach life’s challenges not as “me”  but as “us”  — is anathema to the “newer” ways of thinking. There is no “participation trophy” in marriage; there is teamwork, sacrifice for one’s spouse and children alike, and a mutual commitment to a specific (ideally religiously based) lifestyle.

Are millennials and Gen Z actually better off today for rejecting the tried-and-true ways of the past? Our skyrocketing rates of drug overdose, depression and deaths of despair would seem to provide a clear answer: No.

As I said, although we will grow and learn, and although we will (hopefully) acquire more wisdom and material possessions alike, my wife and I at this earliest stage already have everything we truly need. We greatly look forward to what is to come in the many decades ahead. And in our own small way, we hope to demonstrate a more viable and meaningful lifestyle than that pushed by societal elites today. Please pray for us as we embark on our journey.

How Were the Universities Lost?

 

After October 7, the public was shocked at what they saw and heard on America’s campuses.

Americans knew previously they were intolerant, leftwing, and increasingly non-meritocratic.

But immediately after October 7 — and even before the response of the Israeli Defense Forces — the sheer student delight on news of the mass murdering of Israeli victims seemed akin more to 1930s Germany than contemporary America.

Indeed, not a day goes by when a university professor or student group has not spouted antisemitic hatred. Often, they threaten and attack Jewish students, or engage in mass demonstrations calling for the extinction of Israel.

Why and how did purportedly enlightened universities become incubators of such primordial hatred?
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After the George Floyd riots in 2020, reparatory admissions — the effort to admit diverse students beyond their numbers in the general population — increased.

Elite universities like Stanford and Yale boasted that their so-called “white” incoming student numbers had plunged to between 20 and 40 percent, despite whites making up 68-70% of the general population.

The abolition of the SAT requirement, and often the comparative ranking of high school grade point averages, have ended the ancient and time-proven idea of meritocracy. Brilliant high school transcripts and test scores no longer warrant admissions to so-called elite schools.

One result was that the number of Jews has nosedived from 20-30% of Ivy League student bodies during the 1970s and 1980s to 10-15%.

Jewish students are also currently stereotyped as “white” and “privileged” — and thus considered as fair game on campus.

At the same time, the number of foreign students, especially from the oil-rich Middle East, has soared on campuses. Most are subsidized by their homeland governments. They pay the full, non-discounted tuition rates to cash-hungry universities.

Huge numbers of students have entered universities, who would not have been admitted by the very standards universities until recently claimed were vital to ensure their own competitiveness and prestige.

Consequently, they are no longer the guarantors of topflight undergraduates and professionals from their graduate programs.

Faculty are faced with new lose/lose/lose choices of either diminishing their course requirements, or inflating their grades, or facing charges by Diversity/Equity/Inclusion commissars of systematic bias in their grading — or all three combined.

The net result is that there are now thousands of students from abroad, especially from the Middle East, far fewer Jewish students, and student bodies who demand radical changes in faculty standards and course work to accommodate their unease with past standards of expected student achievement.

And, presto, an epidemic of antisemitism naturally followed.

In such a vacuum, advocacy “-studies” classes proliferated, along with faculty to teach them.

“Gender, Black, Latino, feminist, Asian, Queer, trans, peace, environmental, and green”-studies courses demand far less from students, and arbitrarily select some as “oppressed” and others as “oppressors.” The former “victims” are then given a blank check to engage in racist and antisemitic behavior without consequences.

Proving to be politically correct in these deductive gut-courses rather than pressed to express oneself coherently, inductively, and analytically from a repertoire of fact-based knowledge explains why the public witnesses faculty and students who are simultaneously both arrogant and ignorant.

At some universities “blacklists” circulate warning “marginalized” students which professors they should avoid who still cling to supposedly outdated standards regarding exam-taking, deadlines, and absences.

All these radical changes explain the current spectacle of angry students citing grievances, and poorly educated graduates who have had little course work in traditional history, literature, philosophy, logic, or the traditional sciences.

Universities and students have plenty of money to continue the weaponization of the university, given their enormous tax-free endowment income. Nearly $2-trillion in government-subsidized student loans are issued without accountability or reasonable demands that they be repaid in timely fashion.

Exceptions and exemptions are the bible of terrified and careerist administrators.
Faced with an epidemic of antisemitism, university administrators now claim they can do little to curb the hatred. But privately they know should the targets of similar hatred be instead Blacks, gays, Latinos, or women, then they would expel the haters in a nanosecond.

What is the ultimate result of once elite campuses giving 70-80% of their students As, becoming hotbeds of dangerous antisemitism, and watered-down curricula that cannot turn out educated students?

The Ivy league and their kindred so-called elite campuses may soon go the way of Disney and Bud Light.

They think such a crash in their reputations is impossible given centuries of accustomed stature.

But the erosion is already occurring — and accelerating.

At the present rate, a Stanford law degree, a Harvard political science major, or a Yale social science BA will soon scare off employers and the general public at large.

These certificates will signify not proof of humility, knowledge, and decency, but rather undeserved self-importance, vacuousness, and fanaticism — and all to be avoided rather than courted.

The Unhinged Among Us

 

October 7 should have been an open-and-shut case of moral condemnation.

During peace and holiday, invading Hamas, gunmen murdered, tortured, mass raped, decapitated, and mutilated some 1,200 Israelis. The vast majority were unarmed women, children, infants, and the elderly.

The cowardly murderers proudly filmed their atrocities and then fled back to Gaza — to cheers from the Gaza street.

Before Israel even retaliated, the mass murder of Jews earned praise from the Middle East, the international hard left, and especially the faculty and students of elite Western campuses.

When the Israeli Defense Forces struck back, the killers dispersed to the safety of their multibillion-dollar subterranean cities. The cowardly elite architects of the mass murder fled to Arab sanctuaries in Lebanon and Qatar.

From its headquarters burrowed below hospitals, mosques, and schools, Hamas bartered hostages for a reprieve from the IDF and the release of its own convicted terrorists in Israeli jails.

Hamas shot any of its own supporters who refused to shield Hamas gunmen.

It continued launching rockets at Israeli civilian centers. It serially lied about its casualties, expropriating intended relief food and fuel for its underground tunnel city of killers.

Abroad, Hamas supporters also emulated the methods of the pro-Nazi demonstrators in Western cities of the 1930s. Unlike their pro-Israel critics, the pro-Hamas demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe turned violent.

They took over and defaced private and public property. They chanted genocidal antisemitic slogans calling for erasure of the nation of Israel.

They interrupted shoppers, blocked highways, attacked businesses, and swarmed bridges. They assaulted the police.

The majority wore masks to hide their identities in the fashion of antisemitic Klansmen.

Why did the doctrinaire left, the youth of the Democratic Party, and the campuses outdo each other in their antisemitic venom toward Israel?

For the first time in their lives, many of the ignorant protestors suddenly professed concern about refugees, colonialism, disproportionality, innocent civilians, and the rules of war.

But none could explain why the Palestinians who fled Israel in 1947-48 still self-identify as victimized “refugees” when 900,000 Jews ethnically cleansed from Middle-East Arab cities about the same time do not.

The 200,000 Greek Cypriots driven out from northern Cyprus by Turkey apparently do not warrant “refugee” status either.

Few protestors knew that Jews had lived in present-day Israel for over three millennia. The longest colonialist presence there was Muslim Turks, who brutally ran the Holy Land for 300 years until they lost in World War I and were expelled.

How exactly did the eighth-century A.D. Al-Aqsa Mosque happen to be built within King Herod’s earlier Second Temple enclosure?

The pro-Hamas crowd has little appreciation that colonizing Arab Muslims has one of history’s longest records of “settling” other countries far from their historic birthland.

They “settled” and “colonized” the Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine Middle East, Berber North Africa, and southern Spain. Millions of Middle Easterners migrated to — “settled?” — supposedly infidel European cities, where they often self-segregate and do not assimilate fully with their magnanimous hosts.

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As far as “disproportionality,” it is the goal of every power at war, Hamas included.

What protestors are furious about is that Israel is more effective at being disproportionate in retaliation than Hamas and its Iranian supporters were in their preemptive mass murdering.

Targeting innocent civilians? Hamas is among the current greatest offenders in the world.

It rockets Israeli cities without warning. It mass murders Jews in their beds during peace. It exposes Gazans to mortal danger by impressing them as human shields. Hamas shoots those who refuse.

The “rules of war” are violated by Hamas daily. Such protocols require combatants to wear uniforms not to blend in with civilians, not to use them as shields, not to murder noncombatants, not to rape them, not to mutilate them, and not to execute civilians without trial.

Why, then, would millions ally themselves with this odious reincarnation of the SS?

Are they ignorant of the history of the Middle East?

Are they arrogant since few challenge their hate and threats?

Are they opportunists who feel mouthing anti-Western shibboleths gains them career traction in leftist-run media, academia, and popular culture?

Are they bullies who count on the Western silent majority to remain quiet as they disrupt lives, trash Western tolerant culture, and commit violence?

Like Hamas that they support, do they despise Jews? Why else do they express an existential hatred toward Israelis that they never display to any other group?

Those now on the street utter not a peep about the Sudanese Arab mass killers in Darfur, Chinese oppressors of the Muslim Uighurs, Russians targeting civilians in Ukraine, or ISIS, Syrian, and Yemeni murderers of fellow Muslims.

Yet all of these terrorist killers are guilty of the very charges the protestors falsely attribute to Israel. But they are all not Jewish — and that explains the pass given them by our antisemitic, pro-Hamas street.

The Great China-American Abyss

 

Imagine if the United States treated China in the same way it does us.

What if American companies simply ignored Chinese copyrights and patents and stole Chinese ideas, inventions, and intellectual property as they pleased and with impunity?

What if the American government targeted Chinese industries by dumping competing American export products below the cost of production — to bankrupt Chinese competitors and corner their markets?

What would the communist Chinese government do if a substantial American spy balloon lazily traversed continental China — sending back to the United States photographic surveillance of Chinese military bases and installations?

How would China react to America stonewalling any explanation, much less refusing to apologize for such an American attack on Chinese sovereignty?

Envision a U.S. high-security virology lab in the Midwest, run by the Pentagon, allowing the escape of an engineered, gain-of-function deadly virus.

Instead of enlisting world cooperation to stop the spread of the virus, the American government would lie that it sprung up from a local bat or wild possum.

Washington would then make all its relevant military scientists disappear who were assigned to the lab while ordering a complete media blackout.

America would forbid Chinese scientists from contacting their American counterparts involved in the lab, despite the deaths of more than 1 million Chinese from the American-manufactured disease.

And what if, during the first days of the pandemic, Washington had quietly prevented all foreign travel to the United States while keeping open one-way direct flights from America to major Chinese cities?

How would Beijing respond if American biotech company warehouses were discovered in rural China with unsecured vials of deadly viruses and pathogens?

Would China be angered that an American company never notified that it had left abandoned COVID and HIV viruses and malaria parasites in its facilities? Along with rotting genetically engineered dead rats littering the floors with hundreds more lab animals abandoned in laboratory cages?

What would Chairman Xi Jinping have done if American-made fentanyl was shipped in massive quantities to nearby Tibet on the Chinese border? And what if it were deliberately repackaged there as deceptive recreational drugs and smuggled into China, where it annually killed 100,000 Chinese youth, year after year?

What if 10,000 Americans this year illegally crossed the Indian border into China and disappeared into its interior?

What if an allied Asian nation — such as South Korea, Japan, or Taiwan — went nuclear. And what if, in North-Korean style, it serially blustered to send one of its nuclear missiles into the major cities of China?

What if, almost monthly, China discovered an American military operative teaching incognito at a major Chinese university or among the ranks of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army?

Would China object if an American femme fatale agent was sleeping with a high-ranking Chinese official of the Chinese communist politburo?

Or what if one of the chauffeurs of its top-ranking Chinese officials was a nearly two-decade-long American agent?

What would be the Chinese reaction if there were 350,000 American students attending schools all over the Chinese nation, with perhaps 3,000-4,000 of them actively engaged in national security espionage on behalf of the United States?

These “what-ifs” could be expanded endlessly. But they reflect well enough the great asymmetry in the bizarre Chinese-American relationship.

Obviously, China would not tolerate America treating it as it does the Americans.

Why, then, does the imbalance continue?

Do naive Americans believe that the more China is indulged, the more it will respond in kind to American magnanimity?

Does the U.S. believe that the more China is exposed to our supposedly radically democratic and free culture, the sooner it will become an excellent democratic citizen of the global community?

Are we afraid of China because it has four times our population and believes its economy and military will overtake ours in a decade?

Are we terrified that the Chinese government is entirely amoral, utterly ruthless, and capable of anything?

Or are our political, cultural, and corporate elites so compromised by their lucrative Chinese investments and joint ventures that they prioritize profits over their own country’s national security and self-interest?

And did the Biden family — including President Joe Biden himself — in the past receive millions of dollars from Chinese energy and investment interests?

Did Hunter Biden’s quid pro quo decade of grifting result in millions in Chinese money filling the Biden family coffers — all in exchange for the current Biden and past Obama administrations going soft on Chinese aggression?

No one seems able to explain the otherwise inexplicable.

But one way to get along with China and to regain its respect is to deal with it precisely the way it deals with the United States.

Anything less and America will continually be treated with even more Chinese contempt– and eventually extreme violence.

Are we the Byzantines?

 

When Constantinople finally fell to the Ottomans on Tuesday, May 29, 1453, the Byzantine Empire and its capital had up to that point survived for 1,000 years beyond the fall of the Western Empire at Rome.
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Always outnumbered in a sea of enemies, the Byzantines’ survival had depended on its realist diplomacy of dividing its enemies, avoiding military quagmires, and ensuring constant deterrence.

Generations of self-sacrifice ensured ample investment for infrastructure. Each generation inherited and improved on singular aqueducts and cisterns, sewer systems, and the most complex and formidable city fortifications in the world.

Brilliant scientific advancement and engineering gave the empire advantages like swift galleys and flamethrowers – an ancient precursor to napalm.

The law reigned supreme for nearly a millennium after the emperor Justinian codified a prior 1,000 years of Roman jurisprudence.

Yet this millennium-old crown jewel of the ancient world that once was home to 800,000 citizens had only 50,000 inhabitants left when it fell.

There were only 7,000 defenders on the walls to hold back a huge Turkish army of over 150,000 attackers.

The Islamic winners took over the once magical city of Constantine and renamed it Istanbul. It had been the home of the renowned Santa Sophia, the largest Christian church in the world for over 900 years. Almost immediately, this “Church of the Holy Wisdom” was converted into the then largest mosque in the Islamic world, with minarets to follow.

So what happened to the once indomitable city fortress and its empire?

Christendom had cannibalized itself. Western Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy fought endlessly. Westerners often hated each other more than they did their common enemy.

In the final days of Constantinople, almost no help was sent from Western Europe to the besieged city.

In fact 250 years earlier, the Western Franks of the Fourth Crusade had detoured from the Holy Land to storm the supposedly allied Christian City of Constantinople. Then they ransacked it and hijacked the Byzantine Empire for a half-century. Constantinople never quite recovered.

The 14 th-century Black Plague killed tens of thousands of Byzantines and scared thousands more into moving out of the cramped city.

But the aging and dying empire battled more than the challenges of internal divisions, or an unforeseen but deadly pandemic and the empire’s disastrous responses to it.

The last generations of Byzantines had inherited a global reputation and standard of living that they themselves no longer earned.

They neglected their former civic values and fought endless battles over obscure religious texts, doctrines, and vocabulary.

They did not expand their anemic army and navy. They did not reunite their scattered Greek-speaking empire. They did not properly maintain their once life-giving walls.

Instead of earning money through their accustomed nonstop trade, they inflated their currency and were forced to melt down the city’s inherited gold and silver fixtures.

The once canny and shrewd Byzantines grew smug and naive. Childlessness became common. Most now preferred to live outside of what had become a half-empty, often dirty, and poorly maintained city.
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Meanwhile they underestimated the growing power of the Ottomans who systematically pruned away their empire. By the mid-15th century, Islamic armies were ready to exploit fatal Byzantine weaknesses.

The Sultan Mehmed II grandly announced the Ottomans were now the real, the only world power. Ascendant Ottoman armies would eventually move on to the very gates of Vienna in an effort to rule all the lands of the ancient Roman empire.

We should take heed from the last generations of the Byzantines.

Nowhere is it foreordained that America has a birthright to remain the world’s preeminent civilization.

An ascendant China seems eerily similar to the Ottomans. Beijing believes that the United States is decadent, undeserving of its affluence, living beyond its means on the fumes of the past – and very soon vulnerable enough to challenge openly.

Left and Right seem to hate each other more than they do their common enemies.

Like the Byzantines, Americans gave up defending their own borders, and simply shrugged as millions overran them as they pleased.

Our once iconic downtowns, like end-stage Constantinople before the fall, are now dirty, half-deserted, dangerous, and dysfunctional.

America prints rather than makes money, as its banks totter near bankruptcy.

Americans similarly believe they are invincible without ensuring in reality that they are. Our military is more worried about being “woke” than deadly.
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Like Byzantines, Americans have become snarky iconoclasts, more eager to tear down art and sculpture that they no longer have the talent to create.

Current woke dogma, obscure word fights, and sanctimonious cancel culture are as antithetical to the past generations of World War II as the last generation of Constantinople was to the former great eras of the emperors Constantine, Justinian, Heraclius, and Leo.

The Byzantines never woke up in time to understand what they had become.

So far neither have Americans.