London Bridge Is Burning Down

From Chuck Colson

Where are these “feral children” coming from? Hastings’s answers sound ominously familiar.

First, he says, these young people are utterly adrift. “Nobody,” he writes, “has ever dared suggest to them that they need feel any allegiance to anything, least of all Britain or their community.” And I would add their God or their fellow human beings. They are functional nihilists; people who believe in nothing except satisfying their urges.

Second, Hastings says, “The [liberal] social engineering industry unites to claim that the conventional template of family life is no longer valid.” Single motherhood is encouraged, fathers are missing.

Finally, British schools are basket cases: teachers have lost control and are frequent victims of threats and curses.

Hastings concludes, these young hellions “are the product of a culture which gives them so much unconditionally that they are let off learning how to become human beings.” …

Surveying the wreckage in London, Hastings hits the nail on the head: Liberal opinion holds that these feral children are victims, but not in the way we normally think of victimhood. They are, he writes, “victims of a perverted social ethos which elevates personal freedom to an absolute, and denies the underclass the discipline -- tough love -- which alone might enable some of its members to escape the swamp of dependency in which they live.”

Well, the Brits are waking up to the smoke-and rubble-filled reality. The urgent question for us is this: Will we?

Read the whole article here …