What's it all about Alfie?

Melanie Phillips has written a piece for Daily Mail on-line concerning the baby born of 15-year-old mother by a 13-year-old father: (click on title for link).

As usual Melanie enters the moral maze with great confidence and an aerial diagram of the layout. This time I’m not necessarily lock-stepping her all the way, as there may be more than one way through it.

Moreover, there is an elephant wandering around in this one, which everyone seems to be ignoring. How are they going to prevent this young 'couple' from continuing their illegal sexual relationship when it has already borne fruit, so to speak? Denying ‘parents’ conjugal rights that might cement a relationship that would benefit the baby in later years could be deleterious - a tricky problem for both familes, the social services and the police, I would have thought. The difficulties are obvious, but the solutions are not easily formulated. Perhaps there may have to be blind eyes turned here to allow evolution to proceed in the least worst of all possibilities. Innocence is something we should do all we can to protect in children, but once lost it cannot be restored or repaired, but it can be replaced by support, education and encouragement towards parental responsibility and the natural affection involved fostered in all possible ways.

Sadly, there are thousands of couplings of individuals whose maturity is probably even less developed than that of these two children, but whose legal right to breed is inviolate merely because of the arbitrary parameter of age alone and they have ‘rights’. Whether the result is any better for society than this sad little story is debatable.

In the counter culture ethos (or rather chaos) that has engulfed us, ostracism, peer group pressures, judgemental attitudes and other social mores that were once natural regulators (along with civil and religious laws) are now infra dig - in some cases illegal. It follows that an increase in feral children, promiscuous and/or perverted sexual behaviour, breeding patterns and all the consequences that issue forth are inevitable. Add to that the all-pervasive and baleful influences of television and its intrusion into childhood, through lack of any real regulation or even parental supervision, and it is perhaps inevitable that things will have to get worse before, or rather if, they are to get better. Humanity is too clever by half and too stupid by a country mile to better its lot on this planet. There’s the paradox! And most of us shrank from stamping our feet harder and resisting the great army of the deluded and depraved culture warriors when they started their long march.

At least in this particular case, the little family involved emerges from the same nation, race, social status; the child is the issue of a heterosexual coupling with no test tubes involved and if they are given the privacy and support they need, it could turn out to be a happy family in 5 – 10 years, who knows? Calm down dear, it’s only nature taking its course; admittedly, on this occasion, a little prematurely, but there is a possibility of a good result, at least. Just give Old Father Time a chance to help out. In the meantime someone has to decide whether this prematurely aged young man is entitled to his regular ration of oats and in due course the young lady too, to balance the more onerous elements of parenthood as it did for most of us, I guess. I’m just glad I don’t have to decide on that issue.

Ahhh. There’s the exit to this maze. I’m outa here before I get trampled to death. By Melanie that is, not the elephant!

The Way We Were...

After the huge loss of men on the Somme during World War I, and before the USA entered the war, some women visited the American Ambassador in London to ask him for help in finding their menfolk. Walter Hines Page, the US Ambassador, recorded:

"I suppose a thousand English women have been to see me - as a last hope - to ask me to have enquiries made in Germany about their 'missing' sons or husbands, generally sons. They are of every class and rank, from Marchioness to scrub-woman. Every one tells her story with the same dignity of grief, the same marvellous self-restraint, the same courtesy and deference and sorrowful pride. Not one has whimpered...It's the breed....They never weep; their voices do not falter. Not a tear have I seen yet. They take it as part of the price of greatness and empire. You guess at their grief only by their reticence. They use as few words as possible and then courteously take themselves away. It isn't an accident that these people own a fifth of the world. Utterly unwarlike, they outlast anybody else when war comes...."

(quoted in 'A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900' by Andrew Roberts)