Like many who watched the Hamas attacks unfold on television, the images of burnt-alive bodies and child corpses being piled into shabby truck beds slapped me awake into a truer and more terrible reality. My good fortune borders on the hallucinatory in times like these — the fridge full of fresh food in the kitchen, the stack of good books on the lampstand, the newborn child wriggling on my lap with play in his eyes. After all, there is no reason why psychopathic killers shouldn’t suddenly drop out of the sky and butcher my family; no reason we should be spared an agonizing and animalistic death.

The longer I think about it, the less sense it makes.

To wit, the universe is approximately 13.7 billion years old — a number that may as well be gibberish for our inability to comprehend it. The Earth is 4.5 billion years old, modern humans 300,000, civilization 40,000, agriculture 12,000, the steady current of electricity 150… you get the point. We are unfathomably fortunate to live in 21st-century America, warts and all. The odds that we should have skipped over the vast stretches of darkness to arrive here — in our climate-controlled homes with high-speed internet — are functionally zero. And yet, inexplicably, here we are.

But the news out of Israel is a grim reminder that our unfathomable good fortune is only that. We are not entitled to this age of plenty; we are not guaranteed that it will persist. The darkness is a dogged foe. It yawns at will and swallows up the spaces in which the light has not been tended.

The economic miracle of America has produced unrivaled prosperity and technological marvels, but it has not tended its light, which is the same in every civilization: its children. The youth mental health crisis seems to be without bottom as more children than ever before report feeling some ongoing psychic malady. Four in 10 report feeling “persistently sad or hopeless ,” according to a recent study. One in five report to have seriously considered suicide.

We have failed to confer the moral instruction that enabled our ancestors to thrive in favor of expediency: cheesy relativism for hard questions, fast food for busy lives, and nonstop digital entertainment for the gaping hole of meaninglessness in the postmodern world. We have failed to teach the next generation that the meaning of life is to fashion the heart for heaven. And so they became enamored of other pursuits.

The darkness made quick work of our spiritually neglected children. On American university campuses, they now side openly with the very faces of evil and their nihilistic stooges in the academy. “Glory to the martyrs!” they chant at the University of Wisconsin at Madison , openly celebrating Hamas’s acts of terror. “We will liberate the land by any means necessary!”

“The events that took place yesterday are a step towards a free Palestine,” declared a student group at the University of Virginia. “We stand in solidarity with Palestinian resistance fighters.”

Students in masks — is that meant to signal moral virtue or vice? I can’t tell anymore — at George Washington University held an event called “ Vigil for the Martyrs of Palestine ” that mourned the death of Hamas terrorists who had just finished raping, torturing, and murdering 1,400 Israelis. On campuses across the country, flyers that featured the hang-gliders used by the terrorists were distributed for events such as these.

It has long been clear that we’ve failed these children, but to see it laid bare like this is terrible and painful. We inherited a level of prosperity unknown to the kings and queens of history, but we taught our children to despise the very ground upon which it was built; to despise not only their enemies, real and supposed, but the whole of existence including themselves.

They, like the suicidal psychopaths of Hamas, see humanity as a blight.

Sit in an environmental studies lecture for five minutes, and you’ll see they are not interested in saving the world for the sake of humanity but in saving the world from humanity. When the next wave of Jihadi terror reaches our shores — and it will — it breaks my heart to consider whether or not they will mourn or celebrate with their professors because I’m sure the latter is true.

At root is a profound ingratitude for the unfathomable gift of life — in this age or any. May God have mercy on us.

Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner. His work has also appeared in RealClearPolitics, the Catholic Thing, and the National Catholic Register.