From a sad, beautiful essay

Posted on December 29, 2018 by KG

By Peter Hitchens.

…They were the faithful, the best, self-selected for early childless death in the mud. We could not afford to lose them. Their names, listed intolerably outside Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, in the chapels of the great schools, and on granite memorials in every city, town, and village, are the names of those who would have maintained our traditions of Christian liberty and justice in every calling, profession, and trade, and who now lie, far from home, dead before they could get children and pass on their virtues. We who were left behind live in the ruins of a lost civilization, scuttling in and out of doorways too tall for us.

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12 Responses to From a sad, beautiful essay

  1. Brown says:
    December 29, 2018 at 09:10

    He writes beautifully and this subject is clearly close to his heart. There is a day coming when all that is noble, just and good will be seen clearly, not man’s feeble works, but the one who will judge the world.

    • KG says:
      December 29, 2018 at 09:32

      We can only hope, Brown.
      “honour is often what remains after faith, love and hope are lost”.
      Jacob Burckhardt

  2. KG says:
    December 29, 2018 at 09:34

    Meanwhile, pardon me while I vomit:
    https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12180110

    How bloody far have we fallen……..

  3. Ed Bonderenka says:
    December 29, 2018 at 13:45

    Wow. An evolutionary slant on the demise of our culture.
    All the good guys self-selected to die.
    The ne’er-do-wells stayed behind and procreated.
    Good argument against evolution.
    Evolution is supposed to run with positive results, where instead nature runs to entropy.

    • KG says:
      December 29, 2018 at 14:06

      I’m not sure that evolution is supposed to run with positive results, Ed. Surely the process has thrown up far more failures than what we regard as successes?
      This might provide a clue:

      ‘Why Millennials Can’t Anticipate or Fend For Themselves’
      https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-fallible-mind/201405/why-millennials-cant-anticipate-or-fend-themselves

      • Brown says:
        December 29, 2018 at 16:36

        I think that we need to contemplate how evolution works over the long term. The dinosaurs didn’t disappear out because they were unsuccessful. Things changed rapidly and they were unable to cope with that. Millennials will be the same – the world won’t wait for them and they’ll vanish because the world will dispose of them because they are useless. The difference between them and the dinosaurs is that the millennials were never successful and their mark on history will be brief and nasty. I would like to say trivial as well but suspect they will do so much damage as they stagger to oblivion their legacy, unlike them, will not be trivial.

        • KG says:
          December 29, 2018 at 19:53

          Can’t argue with that, Brown. http://falfn.com/CrusaderRabbit/wp-content/plugins/wp-monalisa/icons/wpml_yes.gif

        • Col. B. Bunny says:
          December 30, 2018 at 15:23

          A girlfriend back when had a boat with an outboard motor on it. I thought it would be fun to try to get the motor running again, which I did. She had three teenaged sons, not one of whom showed the slightest interest in the project. One can read too much into just about anything but when I was 15 you could find me under the engine of a Ford Model A.

          I swear there are young men today who can’t change a tire or survive a night in the woods with a kerosene stove, electric socks, and a machine gun.

          That was the thing that put me off about Obongo. I just couldn’t see him working on his car drinking a brewski on a Saturday. Rebreathing dope smoke in a car with the windows rolled up, yes, but doing anything practical, no.

          • KG says:
            December 30, 2018 at 16:59

            “..or survive a night in the woods with a kerosene stove, electric socks, and a machine gun.”
            And a smartphone…. :mrgreen:

  4. Darin says:
    December 30, 2018 at 03:19

    One of the few Latin phrases I learned early on was “Potissimum vero” Above all else truth-
    If we look back at the lives of the Cathedral builders,the earliest ones lived in a world that was very dark and ugly.Life was hard,brutal and short for most people,yet these men,in their quiet time,turned thier minds to building a lasting expression of all that was beautiful in the time they knew.They did this so future generations could find the will to move on against the odds and build a great nation and culture.They knew that in the end,only truth would transcend the darkness.

    Today truth has been replaced by whatever lie is fashionable.The effect has been to sow the seeds of our own destruction.The funny thing about decay,is that unlike life,it is exponential.We are living in a time when the body of truth has been reduced to dried bones and even they are being reduced to dust before our very eyes.

    Example-California,the state that had everything going for it,now spiraling down the drain-
    https://youtu.be/zP9HqFt_bWA