It is a strange world we live in, and now and again, events align in such perfect tension that I wonder if it is not more than mere happenchance at work. There is, at my new job, a television playing a loop of ads. I hear it throughout the whole day.
I also hear my coworkers talking. I hear their voices in the distance, mixing with the voice of the TV.
“What we should have is automatic abortion, and for people to opt into birth.”
“Don’t choose extinction,” the television cried as if in reply.
“We have a population crisis,” my coworker argued. What a wonderful ambiguity!
It was strange to hear these in tandem. I know my coworker was being hyperbolic, and I know that the ad had a completely different context, that the import of the line as the actor said it, as I have heard it a thousand times before and after, had nothing to do with abortion.
And I think of a song which used to play on the radio—it is perhaps overly sentimental—where the singer describes the current state of America, portrays my foolish country with the line: “Save the trees and kill the children.”
Because that is the context of the ad, an environmentalist message.
In his book, What’s Wrong With the World, Chesterton urges us to start with what is good. We can all agree on what is bad, but the problem is that we cannot all agree on what is good. Let us start with what is good, a baby, a mother, a father, that is, a family.
“If other things are against it, other things must go down. . . . all the kingdoms of the earth shall be hacked about and mutilated to suit” this ancient and human institution of a family.
At least, that is my prayer, that this current state of hacking and mutilation would return upon the hackers and mutilators, that this next generation will take the saws and pinchers from the hands of the serial killers and turn them upon the serial killers.
That is, if there is a next generation.
Tale Told 