Greater than Happy
We look at the world today in dismay at how childhood has changed. I can remember back to long summer days riding my bike up and down the ally at the back of my house, stopping only occasionally to drink tepid orange squash from a plastic beaker. Everything seemed so innocent.
I had no obese friends, I had no friends that were groomed into believing they were the opposite sex. I had no friends that held guilt for the achievements of the country in which they were born and lived; and we all thought that sex was a mysterious activity between married men and women. We sang hymns at school and said the Lord’s prayer. We understood consequence and right from wrong; and in the forty years since those days, I can’t believe how so much has changed.
Now I don’t want to sound like some old git reminiscing about his past through rose-tinted spectacles trash-talking the modern world and all in it. Mostly because everything that we are seeing today I am also a part of, and therefore a part of the responsibility for its decay falls on my shoulders also.
Aggressive feminism and equality, throwaway liberalism, unaccountability and baseless entitlement have all played their part in the destruction of the family unit and the wider fracturing of Western identity.
Aggressive egalitarianism.
Equality is the aim, but such an aim is impossible and so everything should be destroyed in the pursuit of the unattainable. Have I described it correctly? I’ll consider this carefully should I ever find myself in the unenviable position of being incapacitated in a burning tower block and an eight stone, 5ft 4in nineteen-year-old woman arrives in an ill-fitting respirator to put me over her shoulder to carry me down a ladder to safety.
This may seem like an extreme example, but I have seen with my own two eyes such lunacy in action, but what does it teach our children? It teaches them that selfishness and entitlement are more important than common levels of intelligence, basic humanity and the greater good of all. That the entire fire-service, for example, should lower its standards to accommodate people that are physically inappropriate for what could be a very physically demanding role, even if lives are put in danger.
I always quite fancied myself as a fighter pilot, but hay fever, childhood claustrophobia and being too tall soon put pay to that idea. Thinking back, maybe I should have demanded they make the cockpits much bigger and put better pollen filters in the oxygen masks, I should have taken the RAF to court and fought a protracted legal battle costing an unfathomable amount of taxpayers money. I should have done it not for myself, but for all lanky, itchy-eyed, scared of getting stuck in a lift whiners out there seeking justice!
Throwaway liberalism.
The value of a society can be measured against how its people recognise, respect and cherish the riches that have been handed down to them. The very fabric of a modern successful, functioning and moral nation is forged in fire by hands who toiled and suffered to build it over generations.
Our forefathers readily protected us against invaders with pitchfork and rifle, embraced their children on their return from long shifts covered in either soil, oil, coaldust or cement. They upheld the teachings of the bible in a peaceful, prosperous, safe, green and pleasant land. The throwaway liberal was not grown in those green fields, he occurred because we were not watchful for him, we were complacent, we became blasé forgetting how envied, beautiful and fragile our creation was; and in that moment bitter idealism and absurdity sprang from the ground like Tripods, to flatten it all.
Generally speaking, today the professional liberal nearly always works for the State in some form, detached from creating anything palpable or beneficial for the people. They often fill an unnecessary bureaucratic vacuum of their own making; and get paid by the taxpayer and reap a pension for it. Often with property abroad, they wait for such a time as they see fit to flee the distorted burgeoning new dreamland they have tried to help build, to replace that beautiful, safe, Christian and respectful green land of our forefathers. They do so not because the streets are no longer safe due to predatory roaming gangs of young illegal migrant men whom they campaigned so hard for, but because they prefer the climate elsewhere. Of course.
Unaccountability and baseless entitlement.
Everyone has an excuse for their behaviour, don’t they? I was shouted at as a child. My mum didn’t show me enough attention. My dog died when I was eight, etc.
It is so easy to pass off our sensitivities and over-reactions to the world in which we live today, by always putting ourselves in the position as the victim, but the truth is, such thinking is egotistical, vane and damaging. If there is one thing I have learnt, that is we only ever learn and truly grow outside of our comfort zones. Our forefathers knew this very well, which is why men would often take their sons with them into perilous situations for them to become at least the measure of themselves, and hopefully more. Men only ever want this for their boys – to be greater than themselves.
Happiness, or the pursuit of it is now replacing the word and meaning of “greater”, and it is now seen as the ultimate virtue. The belief that provided your child is “happy” then you are succeeding as a parent is entirely false, and preparing them to fail as adults. I have seen parents allow their children unrestricted use of games consoles and games on their smart-phones. The child is quiet and entirely absorbed into that false and meaningless world of dopamine and oxytocin release, that can turn those children into violent and raging monsters should that drug ever be disconnected. Allowing this is not parenting, it is supplying a drug to keep their kids placid and “happy”. But it is not real happiness, it is as false as the computer-generated world in which it derives – soulless and vapid.
Junk food also, heaving with unnatural preservatives to maximize profits, dangerous levels of refined sugar to create addictions and alter behaviours, with the price kept just so as to be readily available to most children should they pester their parents enough for it. Some junk food is even called “a happy meal” because the marketers know exactly what they are doing and how parents react to the demands of their entitled children that they so desperately want to keep happy and quiet. Childhood obesity is on the increase with many children today unable to pass even the most basic of physical fitness tests, that a few decades ago would be seen as very easy.
It is so easy for us today to simply bypass that responsibility we have to our children by blaming the outside world, fearful of being judged by others or seen as harsh or “insensitive” to the whims and demands of their children. Professional diagnoses of “autism” and “ADHD” are also greatly on the increase, but we must really ask ourselves this, children's mental health has become a very lucrative industry, and one for which many parents will happily engage with if it can be used as the excuse for their child’s behavioural problems.
“Neurodivergent” is the latest newspeak catchphrase being used to gift-wrap and compartmentalise issues that have very often nothing to do whatsoever with any underlying mental health issues. I feel strongly that very often a change in diet that greatly reduces sugar intake, taking away the smart-phone and x-box, and making the child go outside with a football in its hand for an hour a day, would be the greatest medication and gift any parent could give to their child.
Our children are not fragile little China-dolls, they are not going to break into pieces because you’ve pushed them into a situation they felt uncomfortable with. We have a duty, to mould our children into active, resilient and confident young adults able to adapt and flourish in a changing world that will likely offer good opportunities for those with the right attitude.
The easiest path is rarely the right one, that can be said for so much in this world, and we will sometimes have to fight our children in order to push them into situations where they can later feel they have actually achieved something for themselves to build on. They will not thank us for it straightaway, maybe not for years or not at all even, but later in their lives at some point they will realise the beauty in what we did and celebrate it with us.
Matt Single
HOPE Sussex Community
