As we, the people, are compelled to examine everything about what in God’s name has brought us to this awful place, I am drawn to some fundamentals that we allowed ourselves to let slip in the last 80 years, in the period since the last time we defeated the Nazis.

If I were to put it in the most naked form, I’d say the core issue is one of empathy, or the lack of it. Empathy is a pretty basic aspect of our shared humanity, and so almost by instinct, its lack is the one issue that comes up the most as we are faced with our current critical circumstances. Make no mistake, we are at risk of losing it all, losing democracy, losing the western alliance, losing any modicum of freedom or of an ability to take care of anyone less fortunate than ourselves.

To quote Lenin (without being a Leninist), there are decades when nothing happens and there are weeks when everything happens. This period corresponds with the latter, and that is why all that’s happening seemingly so swiftly now could inflict many generations’ worth of damage. Old time tables, the ones that worked for us even just a few months ago, cannot now apply.

I am struck, in particular, by the overtly misogynist aspect of all this. Maybe empathy owes its origins in each new advancement in this world to the intimate relationships of mother and child, to the attention and love that a mother feels and acts upon to provide for and cultivate the life of a helpless newborn and continues through his or her development at least up until the age of a Bas Mitzvah or Confirmation.

For the male adult, it is a combination of perceived necessity and jealousy that can inject itself into this relationship and, in the child’s adolescence or earlier, rip him or her away from the mother into the cold, cruel world where boys are conditioned for war and the girls are diverted into decidedly subservient roles.

All of the adult male heartburn about gender issues are derived from this context. Those among adult women, to the extent they have been thoroughly conditioned to their assigned roles in this male-dominated matrix, will often be assigned to the forefront of howling about this.

Boys become men in order to fight older men’s wars, whether on the battlefield or in an office. Older men see younger ones as fodder. Empathy does not fit into this equation. If younger men are to be sent to war, to kill or be killed, empathy cannot be allowed to cloud the mission, don’t you see. It is solely the domain of the incubator phase of a life.

So now we have Trump, Musk, Vance and the Tate Brothers, all in a row. If you are not familiar with the Tate boys, you should Google them. Trump just bought their freedom from the Romanians where they were being held in jail as traffickers, dealers and rapists. As “influences” on the Internet, they’ve developed a mass cadre force of a million young American men who are feeling their disenfranchisement.

This is now the “manosphere.” The realm of women-hating, chest pounding males, who run around bashing gays and hitting on underaged girls. “Manosphere” might be pronounced “mans who fear,” because, of course, in reality most all “dudes” who sign up as Tate-rs are deeply insecure and wildly sexually impotent. That is, their idea of sex is so damaged by their conditioned psyches that it has become for them nothing but an exercise in power, in “power over,” to please daddy. Almost by definition, sex is equivalent to rape. It has to be, because daddy says we must disrespect the partner in order to emerge from the experience as one fit to roar and dash to be slaughtered on a battlefield, in reality or metaphorically.

When the angel told Abraham to back off and leave Isaac alone, we were supposed to learn from that what being, or becoming, truly human is all about.

The saved child emerges who is then capable of felling a Goliath, and we, as humanity, bathe in the sunlight of that liberation.