The writer is in Australia.
ANY society should be judged on how, and how well, it looks after its most vulnerable.
Without wanting to get into a hierarchy of victimhood, you would expect most lists to include the following – the unborn, babies and young children, the old, the infirm and disabled, returned soldiers, companion animals, wildlife. These days, some would want to add our Jewish citizens.
Note those not on my list. Gays? Not even close. Transsexuals? Pass. Muslims in Western countries fighting Islamophobia? Nope. All these victim groups are not remotely vulnerable. They have Human Rights Commissions and the progressivist state to look after them.
The aforementioned others don’t.
The duty of care in mixed economies is shared between families and the state. In the philosopher John Rawls’s scheme of things, people behind ‘a veil of ignorance’ – what John Locke called a state of nature – would choose to be governed by a sort of welfare state. One that would look after its weakest members, not the sort of boondoggle, mates-rates corrupt order we have now.
And those choosing their preferred polity would probably want the care of the weak to be absolute. To be beyond the reach of competing interests. Like the sensibilities of those who fear, above all else, being called ‘racist’.
Those behind the veil of ignorance would also probably choose wise and caring families. Including extended families of the kind that, once upon a time, could be counted on when the demons came for you. Extended families relegated to non-involvement by the modern state.
As Alice Springs knows only too well.
Well, anyone who missed Jacinta Price’s visceral and arresting interview on Sky News Australia missed a rare bout of Indigenous truth-telling, germane to the issue of protecting the weak. It related to the rape and murder of a five-year-old girl called Kumanjayi Little Baby. You can see it here.
It is truly gut-wrenching.
So how are we doing, John Rawls-wise? Let’s focus on children. The little ones abandoned by their parents to the tender mercies of ideologised state childcare? The children sexually abused by family members, black and white, and by state-school teachers, strangely parked by the Royal Commission which just wanted to get the priests? The hundreds of millions of aborted babies across the West since Roe v Wade? The white working-class girls of Rotherham, Oxford and, yes, Londonistan, left to the tender mercies of Pakistani Muslim child rapists? Aboriginal children in remote places promised in arranged marriages to rapist-husbands?
Enoch Powell foresaw the rivers of blood. But he never foresaw the rape of young girls by grinning ‘refugees’ straight off the English Channel boats. See The Lotus Eaters for an update:
But girls (and boys) accessing social media? We gotta stop that! Oh, and Islamophobia!
It goes without saying that the progressivist elites who run the show, and so should by rights be owning all the problems we now face, are nowhere to be seen. The anti-assimilation generation of do-gooders thought that we could just leave these Indigenous communities to their own devices. The descendants of that generation are now in charge. These harrowing crimes are all happening on THEIR watch. Accountability, anyone? They are the ones who delivered the Alice Springs ecosystem.
Rowan Dean (on Outsiders) has chastised Australian voters for their propensity to keep electing governments that are fiscally incontinent. We are the problem, on this view. Fair call. Well, we also keep electing governments populated by those who conveniently look the other way in the face of unspeakable crimes committed by evil perpetrators who are enabled by policies imposed on us by the elites. Policies loved by the progressives. Crimes committed against the most vulnerable. The really vulnerable. Not the protected, fake vulnerable.
Crimes whose salacious details are salivated over by the 24-hour media but whose lessons are dutifully ignored in the interests of progressivist narrative and forgotten in a week.
The state defines the non-problems. And delivers the non-solutions. Non-solutions that don’t solve real problems and make them worse. Meantime, the vulnerable continue to be ignored. And the caravanserai rolls on. In Alice Springs. In Rotherham. Across our caring lands.
The exceptionalism of children should be seared into our democratic DNA. It clearly isn’t. Canberra is a long, long way from Alice Springs. A little girl is dead. Another little girl. Every parent out there should be wanting to march in the streets. Any parent who has lost a child will relate.
Will the doctors’ wives of the North Shore and their equivalents of equal distinction, who religiously take their children off to after-school violin lessons and such like, and who worry mostly about climate catastrophes, even notice?
Suffer the little children. Someone once said.
