The world has forgotten Easter

A rather sombre assessment from Peter Hitchens:

Two children are savagely mauled in a place where they ought to be safe, a man is dead after being unjustifiably roughed up by a masked robocop – just a typical week in modern Britain.

I could add plenty of medium-sized similar horrors from my local paper. No doubt you could come up with similar tragedies from your own home towns. Moronic, life-ruining violence is now so common that it attracts little national attention. Our police are no longer wonderful, because they are very like the people they serve.

And yet another Good Friday is ignored by a nation that mostly does not even know what Easter is about, except an opportunity for shopping and the start of a holiday.

I have no doubt that these things are connected. Easter is almost entirely about human evil. The story we no longer teach our children is full of fierce drama, in which the human race shows itself at its worst. It could easily take place in our own time. Some say it does so, all the time.

There is a fickle mob, cheering its hero on Thursday, demanding the cruel death of the same person on Friday. There is paid treachery. There is cowardice – friends who pledge lifetime loyalty and break their promise before the next dawn.

There is a smooth politician who knowingly does the wrong thing to please the crowd and save his career.

An innocent man is falsely convicted and rendered into the hands of spiteful torturers. You can easily tell the story is true. We have seen all of these things in our own lifetimes.

And it all ends in utter despair, the hero dying in hopeless agony, not rescued at the last minute, the despicable crowd mocking him to the end.

And if that is the end of the story, then what else should we expect but the ceaseless repetition of the same themes in our own lives – lies, betrayal, mistrust, violence, injustice, impunity, cynical power-worship, government by crude force? That is what we are like.

It is only if it does not end there, and if we believe that it does not end there, that we can construct a society where we can hope for something better.

It seems to me that when Easter was still a great festival, and Good Friday a sombre, silent day of reflection, we were kinder to others, less kind to ourselves, and – in a good way – afraid of a higher justice than can be provided by the Crown Prosecution Service. Is there any good reason why we cannot restore what has been lost?