Giving Up On The Future

LifeSiteNews.com highlights an article by professor Ian Hunter which appeared last month in the National Post and offers much needed perspective for Canadians.

Have Canadians given up on the future, as have the Japanese, who are featured in the article and who constitute some of the focus of Mark Steyn's recent book America Alone?

Apparently, one of the consequences of deaths exceeding births is that in Japan dolls have replaced children.

The Japanese doll for the elderly calls to mind P. D. James's powerful novel The Children of Men (1993)...

Anxiety and despair mark the faces of those aware that in a world without children, they are the last, dying generation. P.D. James gives us a portrait of just what the late Pope John Paul II meant by his incisive phrase the "culture of death."

Professor Hunter notes,

The first recorded commandment God gave in the Garden of Eden was: "Be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth" (Genesis 1:22). But we are moderns, hell-bent on the pursuit of happiness. We do not consider ourselves bound by ancient commandments. We decided collectively -- and quite some time ago -- that ancient wisdom has nothing to teach us.

And then tries [and, I believe, succeeds] to make the connections...

And yet it seems to me that James's single sentence not only explains why there are Yumel dolls instead of children in Japan, but also why it is impossible to arouse Canadians to action about anything-- particularly any moral issue. We are inured to things being as they are because, consciously or unconsciously, we have given up on the future.

When the conscience of a nation becomes dulled [hardened] through the killing over 40 years of more than 3 million innocent children, what hope can there be for the future? We all know, instinctively, that when a child is born into the world, the greatest fascination and delight is the question, and immediate answer, of the hope which that new child brings to this world.

There is a way back to a culture of life in Canada, but it must be moral minded Canadians, and particularly Christians, who must lead the way. And the fastest possible means to accomplish that reversal, should God give us another chance, is through the most basic democratic means...voting. But first comes repentance.

If it were a solution any more simple or obvious, we'd have tripped over it.