THERE’S AT LEAST ONE good thing about being born with a life threatening disease. As the years roll by, you get well practiced at looking into abysses.

That’s been my experience with Cystic Fibrosis, anyway. Having had this disease for four decades, I’ve had several occasions to see worst case scenarios come true. Things that are “unimaginable” to others who have never been part of a community where bad luck is a fixture become commonplace to us.

This is a complicated gift. On the one hand, it can make you occasionally come across as cold and unfeeling. You hear about a horrendous illness or tragedy afflicting a person and you feel great sympathy, but you also say to yourself, “That’s life.” You don’t say those words in the clichéd manner in which they’re usually offered. You say the words because hard experience has taught you that part of life is that sometimes the worst imaginable things do occur.

None of this means that you need to have traveled a hard road to be able to look into an abyss without blinking. Some people are born with the talent. But having some practice doesn’t hurt.

AMERICAN HISTORY IS FULL of religious great awakenings. Periodically, a religious fervor would sweep the land and the population would undergo a spiritual revival. Some people say that we’re in the midst of a mild great awakening right now. The modern left fears such a thing and mindlessly chants a mantra of “theocracy,” but say what you will about America’s great awakenings, none of them ever caused one of the awakened to hijack an airliner and crash it into a high rise while screaming “Praise Jesus.”

The evidence continues to pour in that the Islamic World is undergoing its own great awakening. So obvious is the phenomenon, even the New York Times took notice of it yesterday. In a story that observed the triumph of Islamism, the combination of orthodox Islam with political power, the Times declared pan-Arab Islamism “a wave already washing over the region.”

Such reports don’t provide comfort. An expansionist and aggressive form of Pan-Arab Islam seems to be something that we as a society currently lack the bandwidth to handle. Instead, we choose to convince ourselves that those who intend us harm are confined to lunatic fringe groups like Al Qaeda.

With the success of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood at the ballot box, this view is becoming increasingly untenable. Also disquieting is the huge popularity that Hezbollah now basks in after its war with Israel.

The comforting false hopes is that there’s some way we can achieve peace in our time by combining obsequious diplomacy and carefully targeted ignorance. This view disregards recent history. Bill Clinton and his lackeys spent eight years assiduously endeavoring to be an honest broker in the Middle East. The distinctions between Israel and a murderous tyrant like Yasser Arafat eluded President Clinton’s highly refined sense of morality.

And what did these policies bring? Blown up embassies, nearly sunk destroyers, an attack on the World Trade Center. None of these things brought a muscular response. In fairness to Clinton, his policies as always reflected the daily opinion polls – as a people, we hoped that if we left the region alone or successfully appeased it, the region could pursue its honor killings, subjugation of women, murder of homosexuals and occasional genocides without bothering us.

BUT NOW WE’VE REACHED a historical juncture where we’re looking into an abyss. The amount of people in the region who desire war is unknown, but we do know that their numbers go far beyond Al Qaeda and its spin-offs. The threat is not limited to terrorism; the truly existential threat comes from popular governments that intend us harm and who are unlikely to be deterred or contained.

In late 1938, Winston Churchill passed a London restaurant and heard great bonhomie coming from within. Churchill said to his companion, “Those poor people. They little know what they will have to face.”

The same can now be said of American society today. Some people choose to believe that the greatest threat to our way of life is George W. Bush. These people deserve the condemnation that history will heap on them.

Others more acutely recognize the threat, but are hamstrung by their fealty to political correctness. If a major daily paper ever wrote an essay like this one, CAIR would pitch a fit. Writing pieces like this invariably brings angry rebukes from those who refuse to look into the abyss and would rather focus their considerable capacity for rage at less formidable targets than hundreds of millions of angry, dangerous people.

But an abyss is what we face. And looking away won’t change a thing.

Compliments? Complaints? Contact me at Soxblog@aol.com.