- What’s the best gift you can give any child? Someone to look up to.44444 U.A.E via Foter.com / CC BY-SA
The story that mattered most in the storied year of 2015 was the Planned Parenthood abortion videos. How do I know that’s so? Because no one wants to talk about it.
We are ghouls, as a culture, and we have known that all along, but we have been able to carry on as knowing ghouls because we have been so very careful to avoid knowing how we are ghouls – how much, how awfully, how fiendishly we are ghouls.
The Planned Parenthood videos, brought to us with an unflinching courage by the Center for Medical Progress, tore away our cherished veil of ignorance and forced us, like it or don’t, to acknowledge what we have become: Self-made monsters at war with the virtues that make the fully-human life possible.
It goes for me, too, and for all of us. I scold, you quaver, but none of us does more than talk. We snicker and natter about barbarians overseas without ever once daring to acknowledge that we have made of ourselves the worst barbarians of all, the barbarians who kill – and metaphorically eat – our own young, mining their substance for lunch money if not devouring their flesh directly, deep-fried.
And that would be bad enough, were we but animals. But unlike all other animals, we can observe what we are doing and reason about it. We can conclude without ever admitting in full consciousness the substance of our conclusions: Human life, to us, for now, is a temporary indulgence with garbage.
Have you lived to be eighty years old? Then you are eighty years late to the dump. Your life has meaning, moment, merit? Oh, Ozymandias, you could not be more wrong. You are not even a sand castle on the beach to us, an evanescent meaninglessness to be swept away by the tides. Instead you are a formless shit-sculpture, a thing to be scraped up and hosed away as quickly as possible, leaving not even a noxious odor as your life’s legacy.
This is what we have done with the gift of Socrates. This is what we have made of The West.
For we kill far more than our young with this genocide, and far more than the future those children would have built. When we slaughter our offspring by the millions, we consign to the dump our belief in the future, our ideals for the ideal human life, our idealization of humanity as such. If any one of us is garbage – unmet and unmeasured – then every one of us is garbage, accidental instantiations of the void, easily eradicated and not to be missed.
We slay the least among us and insist we are cleansing the gene pool. But we murder, too, the best among us, arguing that this will promote the productivity of their abortive parents. In the end we kill our young in order to kill our young, replacing them with pampered pets and pet passions, but, ultimately, replacing them in se – by becoming the infants we refuse to birth.
Ours is a civilization not of charming children but of big babies – incapable of responding to facts as facts and utterly inconsolable over the inevitable clash of world with whim. We refuse to have children because we refuse to stop being children.
This is self-correcting, of course. Good or bad, ideas unpropagated are dead ideas. We are lucky to live, for now, in a world without an Alexander, since big babies are easy prey. But swept up by a conqueror or swept away by the tides, we are temporary because we petulantly refuse to be permanent: We refuse with the rage of a billion big-baby tantrums to be grown-ups.
I speak to the people who want more for humanity – more for their own children, but more, too, for every child. You know your substance is not garbage. Do the world a favor and say so. You know your life is not meaningless. Do the world a favor and make that plain. You know your children – and all children – are not temporarily-ambulating bags of medical waste. Don’t let anyone get away with saying otherwise.
The West is discourse, first and always, the moral philosophy that upholds itself by proudly upholding itself. You are a human being, the wonder of the ages, the paragon of nature, the thing that makes every ideal real. Do the world a favor in 2016: Show the human race how a grown-up behaves.
