Death Race 2000 – a 1975 dystopian thriller, with a tinge of what might pass for humour – takes place in a totalitarian America (!) in the millennial year, with marital law imposed, and the greatest ‘sport’ – well, I will let the Wikipedia description stand for itself:

After the “World Crash of ’79”, massive civil unrest and economic ruin occurs. The United States government is restructured into a totalitarian regime under martial law. To pacify the population, the government has created the Transcontinental Road Race, where a group of drivers race across the country in their high-powered cars and which is infamous for violence, gore, and innocent pedestrians being struck and killed for bonus points

Yes, there was a young Sylvester Stallone, just one year away from Rocky fame, and a cast of other worthies, mowing down people wheelchairs and on crutches as they tried to cross the road. As with a number of such B films filling theatres with such trashy fare– it has proved unwittingly prophetic, with the recent tragedy of in Waukesha, Wisconsin ‘violence, gore and innocent pedestrians being struck and killed for bonus points’. Death Race was what we might have (once?) called a ‘black comedy’, but that may be too much of a double entendre in this case.

From what facts have emerged, a man drove his SUV deliberately into a Christmas parade, deliberately plowing into old and not-so-old ‘dancing grannies’, before swerving into toddlers, children, men, women – didn’t matter, so long as they were ‘white’. Six are dead, and dozens severely injured, and one can but wonder at the rank evil, just before the holidays. There will be at least six empty chairs at the Thanksgiving and Christmas tables.

It seems the perpetrator’s mind, and soul, had been poisoned by the media narrative that ‘white people’ are not only wicked, but responsible for all the miseries of America, including his own unfulfilled and troubled life.

Ideas have consequences, wrote Richard Weaver in 1948, just after 40 million had perished in the war, which is another way of saying lex credendi, lex vivendi – the law of believing, is our law of living. We live as we think, and if we think, and believe, evil, then evil we will do.

There are many now who believe evil, and the only thing stopping them is human law, which is not only fragile, but evolves, in accord with custom, which Saint Thomas says is far stronger than law, and which interprets and shapes law.

Our schools, universities, media have been shaping our customs – the primary origin of our beliefs and thoughts – for some time now, and not in a good direction. Hatred and fear – intimately linked – are embedded deep within our souls, and they make ruin of our reason. Hence, we become susceptible to what is objectively irrational, even, eventually, demonic.

Slavery has its basis in the ‘idea’ that certain humans – semi-humans, in the minds of some – were not persons, but chattel to be bought and sold. And it was not one way: Europeans enslaved Africans, while Muslims enslaved Europeans, and anyone else they could get their hands on. They didn’t much discriminate.

In the French Revolution, those who were deemed ‘anti-revolutionary’ – or not revolutionary enough – were guillotined or simply shot or hacked to death, without trial or mercy.

The First World War: Germans were ‘Huns’, while the French and English were just not German, and they mowed each other down by the millions. Said ‘Huns’ were the first to use poison gas in war, a weapon of mass and indiscriminate destruction.

And need we belabour the dehumanization of the Jews by the Nazis? I agree that facile comparisons should be avoided, but the signs are ominous, for the National Socialist government under Hitler began with euthanizing the ‘unfit’ – imbeciles, epileptics, the ill – and moved on from there to include not only ‘Semites’, but any ‘non-Aryans’ and other undesirables: Gypsies, Catholics – priests especially, and eventually anyone who would not comply with the ‘Reich’.

Should this horror not have ended any attempt to de-personalize human persons, to make any of us untermenschen?

Yet here we are. ‘White people’, defenceless children and grannies, reduced to colonialist bowling pins to be knocked over, the more, the merrier, the more points.

Now calls are being made, by otherwise sane and rational persons, for the ‘unvaxxed’ – already social pariahs, fired, jobless and cast off. There are calls to deny those who demur from this controversial treatment, for whatever reason, medical care, to die outside hospitals in tents. They are already being fined and jailed in Austria and Greece.

And the unborn, who lost their own status as persons over a half century – in 1969 in Canada, under Pierre Trudeau and John Turner, and in 1973 in the United States, by a Supreme Court, headed by Justice William Brennan. All three are self-professed Catholics, members of the Church that gave human beings their dignity, in her teaching that we are all created in the image of the tri-Personal God. If we lose that ‘idea’ – and it may already be lost – we lose everything, the consequences, already around us, unforeseeable. A race to the bottom, with might once again making right.

To paraphrase the nihilistic Sea Wolf, without God and His moral law, we are all just protoplasm to be manipulated, moved about and even massacred, if inconvenient enough.

There are some things that we quite simply cannot do to one another, not because the state says so, but because our Creator does, Who calls each of us back to Him. If we would only listen to His voice, and obey His Word, what a wonderful world this would be! Friends shaking hands, saying ‘how do you do?’, and Christmas once again merry. The choice is ours, the way of life, or death.

On this first day of December, the current Supreme Court will hear a case that may undo Roe vs. Wade. Six of the nine are Catholics, at least in name. We should pray, and hope, they decide in favour of reason, of truth, and of goodness, and declare the unborn a person, with the full rights thereof.

Otherwise, well, not only do our ideas, but our moral decisions, have consequences, eternal ones, with not only our souls, but the very future of humanity, hanging in the very balance.

 

 

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