Circles of Love

We can best help those people whose needs we know best, which is to say the people closest to us.  This is the deep meaning of "charity begins at home" and it is the rational basis for the idea of loyalty.  Your duty to those closest to you is greater, not because they are more precious in G-d's sight than the stranger, but because they are the ones you know best how to help, and they are the ones who will hold you accountable if you fail.

And because people are complicated, "helping" often means more than just giving them stuff and doing stuff for them.  People need respect, dignity, self-determination.  If you watch a mother teaching a small child to walk - the mother wants to help the child, but she knows that she has to let the child learn to walk unaided, even if that means falling down once or twice.  And that's really the paradigm for all of parenting - and, broadly, for love, because that mother would sacrifice anything for the child, even as the child must learn to stand on its own two feet.

If you have a family member who struggles with alcohol, or drug addiction, or mental illness, it may be difficult to know how to help, or even if you can help at all.  JD Vance - the author of 'Hillbilly Elegy' - certainly knows this.  (And I speak from some amount of experience here myself.)

It's good to want to help people, and there's nothing wrong with wanting to feel good about helping people.  But sometimes we get stuck pursuing the feeling of "doing good" just so we can feel good about ourselves.  That's narcissism.

If you really care about doing something, you care about results.  If you care about another person, you care about making that person's life better.  That means that you are making sure the help you're giving is really helping them.  And if you're not doing that, then I say it's questionable how good your intentions were in the first place.

The left's strategy is to get us to outsource our moral decision-making, and to devote all our energy and all our caring to the service of some Great Cause that is dictated to us by our masters.  If the object of your "caring" is far away and unknown to you, so much the better - your moral sense can be more easily manipulated, untroubled by questions of "is this actually making people's lives better?"

Vice President JD Vance spoke age-old wisdom when he said:  "... You love your family; and then you love your neighbor; and then you love your community; and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country; and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world."  When we start with our inner circles of family and community, we develop the strength and judgement to put our care and love into sound practice.  This is exactly what the left seeks to destroy, to further its own grandiose schemes.  We must not let this happen.