A fellow writer tells me, “What’s the use?”
Every writer can understand this despair.
F. Scott Fitzgerald put it like this: “What’s the good of all this writing. Nobody reads me.”
That wasn’t true, of course. Plenty people read him. But for all the wonderful prose, was anything getting through?
Charles Bukowski put this thought on it: “I don’t write to save the world. I write to save myself.”
All of us who write, whether through poetry, through fiction, through journalism, can identify.
Often, the urge to communicate is like an SOS. The mendacity is too much to bear alone.
A generation of our children are being ruined through purposeful gender confusion. In Israel, Palestinian Arab school books continue to teach hate against the Jews.
It’s all a con.
We did not need the Durham report to tell us what we always knew…that Trump was the victim of the con of the century.
Four years it took him to tell us this? Still today the media ignore the revealed truth.
How, then, can we compete against such colossal mendacity?
For me, all I ask is one reader with a knowing heart.
But what are the chances for me and that reader against the hordes whose cacophony drowns us out.
Two examples to make the point.
First, a warning. If you are a man capable of helping people in distress, look the other way and mind your own business.
Play it safe, or else you will get arrested. If you are a white man coming to the rescue, you will be scorned as a racist.
So it happened last week on a NYC subway when an ex-Marine took action to save other passengers from a man who appeared violent, and in fact, as it later turned out, the man had a history of being mentally unstable and of attacking women. The ex-Marine only calculated the danger of the moment, wrestled him down, and applied a deadly choke-hold.
The alleged mentally deranged attacker is being mourned as a hero. The ex-Marine has been arrested on a charge of manslaughter.
At first, Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul asked for calm. Nothing should be done, they said, no charges, until all the facts were in.
After all, the people on the train were frightened. Thank goodness the ex-Marine stepped in.
But then race entered the picture. People rioted…blocked subway trains from moving…and so Adams and Hochul caved.
Chalk one up to the mobs, and then another one.
In Israel, the judicial reform initiative was moving ahead. It was a go. Congratulations were coming in about this much needed action.
Leftists thought otherwise. They threatened to bring down the entire country unless judicial reform was stopped.
The government yielded.
Chances are slim that the initiative will come around again…at least for quite some time.
The mob has spoken.
Against all that, what are our chances. But writers will continue to write. We have no choice, and sometimes we do get lucky.
New. Now available, Jack Engelhard’s op-ed collection, Writings, here
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He wrote the worldwide book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal,” the gambling thriller, “Compulsive,” plus the authoritative newsroom epic, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” followed by his coming-of-age classics, “The Girls of Cincinnati,” and, the Holocaust-to-Montreal memoir, “Escape from Mount Moriah.” For that and his 1960s epic “The Days of the Bitter End,” contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Contact: [email protected]
