Today is Super Bowl Sunday and where I live, Indianapolis, Indiana, we are caught up in the cities first run at a title with our hometown football team, the Colts. Everyone is wearing blue and hoping tonight the team will beat the Chicago Bears. You will see very little traffic on the streets of this town tonight.

Reading this mornings Indianapolis Star newspaper carried a front page column by its main sports columnist, Bob Kravitz. He is a good writer. As I followed the column onto page twelve I finished his analysis of the Colts chances to win-and then looked across to page thirteen and was hit with reality. There was a large article about Iran's nuclear program, moving relentlessly forward. That, unfortunately, is the real world, the dangerous world gathering on the horizon and threatening to forever alter our neat little world.

We are sleep walking through history, lulled into a trance by all the distractions around us. This phenomena is described by Barry Casselman. Here is the money paragraph:

I am increasingly convinced that the West is in denial of what is truly happening in the world. This self-delusion is the most dangerous response possible to the intense and rapid change all over the planet. This self-denial takes many forms, including obsessions with abstract issues of little real consequence, e.g., animal rights, capital punishment, celebrity gossip, political correctness, etc. It is accompanied by the rise of secular mandates and the suppression of spiritual values. It exhibits excesses of greed that threaten both capitalism and representative government.

The malign forces that conspire against the West (in contrast to the benign forces which only wish to compete with it), however, are not paralyzed. They are moving and growing at great speed.

You can read the entire article here.

I will take a few hours off tonight and cheer on my Colts. But when the game is over, in the back of my mind, I will wonder, how many more Super Bowls will we watch in the comfort and safety of our corner of the world.