The news of Britain’s riots saddens and sickens me. It saddens me because I feel I know more of Britain than many of its own youths do. I know of a time and a history, a pride and a love, for and of Britain that its children neither appreciate nor acknowledge. I know of a civilized, disciplined world where incredible feats of selflessness and perseverance were practiced, a world that had values and morality so much higher than the pleasure of the self. Britain was a land so united within itself that it was by itself strong enough to withstand one of the greatest of our generation’s terrors, world war.
But now it has lost that moral fortitude. It has lost it from within because the people who suppose to individually practice those values have no more been taught to be selfless and strong. They are taught to be selfish, to live for their own pleasures and their own “identity,” to scoff at all things disciplined and cultural, moral and traditional, to pride in all things borne from one’s inmost desires, not from that second thought which realizes there are other people and other principles more important than oneself.
And that is what sickens me about Britain’s situation now, its new morality. It is society that punishes the married, traditional family with taxes upon non-working mothers, with discouragement of parental tutoring and childhood discipline. It is a society that promotes a child’s right to choose a life for himself, without guidance and without restraint.
But it is such a society that gives empty, searching souls nothing to grasp, nothing from which to guide itself, nothing from which to map its actions against. It is a black blizzard with no horizon. Parents are there to provide that guidance to children, to show the way in this very confusing world. How is a child to know what is right or wrong without someone there who has seen it already and knows how to live a life worthy of its breath?
What has happened in Britain now proves several things. It proves wrong the liberal theory that giving all responsibility to a child makes him choose a worthwhile, fulfilling life. Rather, the premature freedom so willingly thrust upon the youth only give them the freedom to do wrong. It proves that the natural, undisciplined soul is truly dark, that man given to his natural desires will inevitably fall lower and lower, deeper and deeper into sin and lawlessness.
The children of Britain have become a social experiment in Darwinian life, and this is what happens when a world tries to live such Darwinistic ideals – a world where each man is out for himself, without regard or selfless care for another. This quote from a Daily Mail UK article (linked below) is one of many that strikes the heart of the issue and says things quite aptly:
They are essentially wild beasts. I use that phrase advisedly, because it seems appropriate to young people bereft of the discipline that might make them employable; of the conscience that distinguishes between right and wrong.
They respond only to instinctive animal impulses — to eat and drink, have sex, seize or destroy the accessible property of others.
What a sad day it is in Britain today. I pray God will make the people now see their error and change their ways.
Witnessing God 