I suspect some forms of distraction could be called a moral transgression or in less letters and a shorter word, a sin. For example, the spreading of the the lies of crimes in politics while the crime actually occurs in another setting might be called a slight-of-hand sin because while these crimes dominate the headlines across our nation entire populations are needlessly starving. Every newspaper and news service in the country should be devoting the whole of page one to these very preventable tragedies. But as we are aware that is not the case.

Some credit to the New York Times for opening the Thursday edition with the headline 

“Gazans Are Dying of Starvation

The article continues “Severe hunger has gripped the war-torn Palestinian enclave, where growing numbers of people are starving and the doctors treating them are working on empty stomachs. . .While the Gazan MDs search for flour to feed their families “the hunger crisis in Gaza had reached “new and astonishing levels of desperation, with a third of the population not eating for multiple days in a row.” This is preventable if our nations cared enough to force their leaders to pay attention to what matters on this planet rather than bantering distracting cult rumors.  In formal debate there is such a thing as a False Fallacy and more recently the Strawman Fallacy. Basically one intentionally compares or uses the content of two things which have no similarity in origin or content. For example, saying that sympathy expressed for the children and civilian adults of Gaza is antisemitism is a cruel manipulation that provides a form of anesthesia for the active conscience. Let us focus on the children because their innocence in this matter is incontestable. Concern for the lives of children is generally accepted as universally morally required. Allowing children to die of starvation when something could be done is morally reprehensible. The ‘Sense of Good’ this Project talks about is essentially your version of a conscience and when your sense of good is violated, pain ensues, and in our time when pain is present so are the options of distraction from that pain. One of our political parties has accused the other of systemic pedophilia which of course is wholly unsupported by evidence and pretty much a sick joke except of course in an evenly divided country it is a useful Strawman Fallacy (distraction) to draw a few necessary votes. Calling any concern for starving children and civilian adults in Gaza ‘antisemitism’ is yet another one of those cruel Strawman Fallacies except the level of cynicism is one notch deeper and an even more effective distraction from the truth. Distraction is how we try to live with truth that is too painful to face personally or nationally. In never works because your own individual sense of good will grind you down to a bitter state until you face the truth.

Modest Proposal for Good

Follow your conscience and respond to the necessary pain of that sense of good inside of you. Unless you are indifferent to the pain and destruction of infants, children and youth, you have to write, resist and protest the unnecessary starvation, abuse and death of those critical members of our world’s future. Resist and fight the distractions created to anesthetize the conscience of this nation. Vote as you must on domestic issues of lesser criticality, but for God’s sake work for the infants, children ,and youth who are being destroyed under the cover of today’s cynical distractions from good.