A house of horrors abortion clinic in Philadelphia.  A fourth grade teacher in Florida having students print that they would “give up some of [their] constitutional rights in order to be safe or more secure.” A New York high school teacher who assigned his class to “argue Jews are evil” while blaming them for the problems of Nazi Germany.

I am less troubled by who we have become than by the question, “Why don’t we care who we’ve become?” Have these collective offenses to the Divine in each of us been reduced, at best, to passing stories on the nightly news? Why do we not care about education that is agenda based, deceitful and perverse? Why are we so apathetic or hardened to the systematic slaughter of the unborn that we allow it to continue in the name of a woman’s right to choose?

I am a woman and I chose. When my ex-husband and I could not have a child we chose to go to China and adopt our daughter. She is a beauty both inside and out.  In light of the gruesome story out of Philadelphia, I look at her and am pained by the thought that she, too, could have been brutally “terminated” but for the courage of her birth mother, the existence of an orphanage and her own sheer will to survive.  What right do we have, we who are the beneficiaries of the gift of life, to take it from the innocence of others?  Why do we think we can escape the inevitable slippery slope of turning a blind eye to the total disregard and devaluation of human life?  If you know your Purim story and Mordechai’s admonition to Queen Esther, then you know the wisdom teaching that if you try and deny your responsibility towards saving humanity, you too will perish.

As for the stories out of Florida and New York, they are “the canaries in the gold mine” of education.  We are, through “Common Core” and our indifference to the personal responsibility for educating our children, abandoning and enslaving this and future generations to the distortions and perversions of evil. So as the power players bombard us with news and arguments in favor of gun control, they are simultaneously and systematically seeking to selectively control the population and mold minds through abortion and curriculum, respectively.

What they seek to accomplish can only be attained by our accompanying indifference and cooperation. What we think will not happen here is based upon the false premise that it can never happen here because it has never happened here.

The premise is false on two counts.

First, at the end of the Civil War, the nation embarked upon Reconstruction and by way of Black Codes, prohibited  gun ownership from freedmen, slaves and African-Americans.  The result? A flourishing Ku Klux Klan.  We have, in our own history, sought to control birth, education and self-defense of an entire people. It was a shameful time, a blight upon the National saga, with repercussions still felt today.  Secondly, an enlightened and civilized society, Europe of the early twentieth century, was the breeding ground for Adolph Hitler.

Evil can and will exist anywhere humanity allows it to germinate and grow through indifference and cooperation. The good news is that each of us has total control over how indifferent or cooperative we choose to be. Pick your cause. This is the time to be heard. This is the time to stand. Find the indignation within and, with focused intention, speak truth to power. This is your moment.

There is only One of Us. In no more concise a fashion can this be stated than it was by Rabbi Hillel, the 1^st century Jewish sage and scholar who said, “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”

Have the presence of mind to ask yourself “When?”  Then have the courage of heart to hear the response. “Now.”

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