Commentary
by Hilary White
March 19,
2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Britain has lost "one of the most fundamental
and universal features of human society", the idea of the nuclear family
where children have a profound connection to their fathers, Melanie Philips
told us this week in her column in the Daily Mail.
Philips was
writing about Shannon Matthews, whose story occupied the attention of Britain's
tabloid readers when she went missing after school in February. Nine year-old
Shannon was found last week and police are investigating what happened. But the
family's situation, in which Shannon's mother, Karen, has had seven children by
five different men, has caught the attention of some who say that it is
indicative of something terribly wrong... they just can't quite put their
finger on exactly what.
At the same
time, Britain is awash in gang violence, binge drinking, drug abuse,
sex-trafficking, and nearly universal indifference to civic life. The media is
full of speculation as to the cause of dozens of apparently random acts of
violence, including murders, perpetrated by Britain's "feral youth."
But Melanie
Philips has embarrassed them all by pointing out the blindingly obvious, the
rampaging elephant in Britain's sitting room, when she pointed to an
extraordinary statement from Karen Matthews. Several media reports on the case
said that Karen Matthews believes that nine year-old Shannon and her ten
year-old brother are "twins," because they are the children of the
same father.
The author
of "Londonistan" and a columnist and blogger for the Spectator, wrote
of Britain's "underclass composed of whole communities where committed
fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being
bullied."
"Where
sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys
impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought. Where
successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and
cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood."
Karen
Matthews' description of her two children born a year apart to the same
father as "twins" is one of many small indicators, like the
thin scratchings on a seismograph, that indicate a social and cultural calamity
unprecedented in British history.
Half of
England's marriages end in divorce, a third in Scotland and this issue is
almost never addressed in Parliament. The BBC tells us that London is not only
the most expensive city in the world to live in, it is the divorce capital of
the world with a growing industry of "divorce tourism". There were
more than 150,000 divorces in the UK last year.
But even more
alarming is that most people who want to live together simply no longer bother
with the formality of a wedding. In 1950, there were 336,000 first marriages;
in 2000, there were 180,000 first marriages, a percentage change of - 46 per
cent.
Melanie
Philips writes that the children of the post-marriage world "are simply
abandoned in a twilight world where the words 'family' or 'relatives' lose all
meaning, as the transient men passing through their mothers' lives leave them
with an ever-lengthening trail of 'step-fathers' or 'uncles' who have no
biological connection with them whatsoever."
Her remarks
resonated with me personally, since I remember the first rumblings of this
cataclysmic cultural quake and lived through the Divorce Wave. I am not sure if
the history of this cultural cataclysm, that has started to be studied and
written about only recently, adequately takes into account the incredible speed
with which the change came.
I have
always enjoyed disaster movies about the end of the world. Remember that 1998
made-for-tv film, Deep Impact, in which an asteroid hits the earth and most of
the continental land masses are engulfed with a gigantic tidal wave? When I
think of the social shift from marriage and family life to...well, whatever we
have now, I think of that scene in the film in which the intrepid girl-reporter
stands on the beach with her father watching helplessly as a thousand foot high
wall of water rushes at them at hundreds of miles an hour.
It is no
wonder that nothing was done about it, or even written about it, until it was
too late.
I know that
a lot of Catholics say that the legalization of contraception was the start,
but I really think the civilizational apocalypse started when we decided it was
not necessary for married people to remain married. Canada's Prime Minister
Pierre Trudeau, of course, decided that things in Canada would move along more
smoothly if he got all the bits and pieces of the apocalypse into one year and
so we had the Divorce Act of 1968 immediately followed by the Omnibus Bill
legalising abortion, in case anyone was left in any doubt as to what easy
no-fault divorce was meant to lead to.
I was two
and three when the Acts were passed. By the time I was in school a few years
later, the wave from that quake was only beginning to build offshore, but it
picked up speed and strength astonishingly quickly.
In the
early part of the Divorce Wave, when I was starting school, most of the other
kids lived with both married parents. When I was in early elementary school,
the first generation of hippies had yet to break up with their first sets of
"partners". Even at the experimental hippie free school I was sent to
in 1974, I was pretty much the only kid in school who had weekly scheduled
"visits" with daddy.
In those
days the partner turn-over rate was a lot slower. "Relationships"
lasted years, sometimes as many as four or five, and marriage was still fairly
common. This lasted until we, the first generation, made it to about the fifth
grade. It would be another ten years at least before these vestigial
conventions were abandoned and the partner turn-over was reduced to the few
months or weeks we enjoy now.
Three years
later, by the time I started junior high school ("middle school";
grades 8-10) I knew almost no one whose parents were still together and the
partner turn-over had increased to the point where most of the mothers and all
of the fathers were on "partner" number three or four.
I recall
that we, the early generation of the children of divorce, were broadly pitied
and were offered groups at the Y with titles like "The Divorced Kids
Group" where the kids could come and "share" how they felt about
their universe coming abruptly to a halt and the lights going out.
But after
that early blip of attention, there was little said about the social malaise
until in the 1980s articles began to appear in the women's magazines about the
kids who, for some reason, just couldn't be bothered about anything. Generation
X, the children of the hippies, the slacker generation who were in a state of
near catatonic apathy and hopelessness, had no plans, had no hopes, no
aspirations and were filled with cynicism and loathing for everything their
parents cared about.
It was
about this time that the suicide statistics started to be really alarming for
kids born after 1965. This was the generation of Kurt Cobain, born a year
before me and fifty miles away, the lead singer of the Seattle
"Grunge" band Nirvana, who personified this generation's rage and
despair, and whose suicide would be his last angry gesture.
Melanie
describes an entire generation, now branching into three or four, who simply
made no plans for the future, who knew that everything their elders said to
them was a lie, who learned from their parents' fecklessness that no other
human being could be trusted, unless it was to trust them to be self-serving
and callous.
I find it
refreshing and surprising that the connections between the Divorce Cataclysm
and the "youth crime" problem are finally being made out loud, albeit
four decades too late.
Read
Melanie Philips' article,
Reaping the Whirlwind
http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=573