suffer the little children

she could see the machine. Its face was blurry, its body white-coated, moving slowly and methodically among gleaming silver instruments. Gloved fingers reached for an item from the tray by the bed, carefully picking from the metal shapes and pulling out curved scissors.

the woman's body was half-covered with the white sheet, the lower half exposed, legs pushed apart. Her fingers closed over the loose ends of the sheets, unwittingly gripping them, knuckles straining taut. Her whole body knew what had to come from what her mind had done, but the mind itself was suspended in the surreality of the situation. It was impossible that she was chained to her body, when she could feel no connection with it now. The only tie between spirit and flesh was the mind controlling the body's actions - but now, she could no longer sense her body responding.

and, that part of her mind which forced her body to remain tied to the bed, waiting for sharp metal to pierce the child inside her - it had nothing to do with the rest of her mind that was now so distanced from that other, mechanicalised part, that it seemed a separate entity. It was paralysed, she wasn't even trying to sense what she was feeling. But beyond the paralysis was agony, sharp and bitter, that ripped her mind to pieces and had no pity.

There were three people in the room. Only three, because the nurse had chickened out, mentally unfit for the procedure. The woman lay on the bed, and the white machine-surgeon, his mind alive but his morality de-sensitized, was preparing to kill.
And God was there, watching. He was All-powerful, and He felt the woman's numb agony more bitterly than the woman could, as he saw the surgeon carry out the procedure.

...

What do you think? Why do you think God allows suffering?

...

I wasn't going to write today - that is, last night. I was suddenly struck though, with the utter evil of abortion [even what I've perceived of it comes nothing close to the depth of it] and of how weak and feeble those of us who know the truth are in combatting it.

Abortion is the greatest injustice against humanity the world has ever known.
It is greater than all the wars that have been fought.
It is destroying and damaging more people than slavery does. [And by the way, there are more slaves now, in 2010, than there ever were when slavery was abolished].

It is World War III, yet it is profoundly worse than any other war history has known. The truth is that wars are usually fought when two sides are of nearly equal strengths; abortion involves the systematic, silent extermination of billions of people who can not fight back; the only people who can fight for them too often whisper the truth instead of screaming it.

I realised tonight a tiny portion of the huge responsibility I have under God to speak against this agony of abortion. I'm the President of a local pro-life club, and as is the case with too many things I commit to, I easily fall into the belief that this is just a worthy cause.
When I remember that there are fifty babies dying every day, I have to slowly get out of my secure feelings about abortion as just a cause.
Because people, our brothers and sisters, are dying. We know the truth, and we must speak up.

Why be Patriotic? [warning, train of thought follows]

It is currently so incredibly early that my brain has stopped functioning normally.
That is, it is not functioning the way *it normally does*. Note the subtle differentiation..
The background to this post is a status I recently put up on Facebook - [with whom, by the way, I have a strong, though complicated relationship] - which ran: "50 babies were illegally murdered in New Zealand today. That's why I'm not patriotic."
At church last night [by nine minutes] I pretty much lost a debate with someone who disagreed with with me over whether I was justified to free myself of patriotism because of a country's perpetrated evil.
...
Patriots. What immediately springs to mind are those stalwart American men of the Civil War period, polishing up an ancient gun and kissing their families goodbye as they bravely leave to go and fight corageously for their kindred and country.

The movie "The Patriot", starring Mel Gibson is an extreme display of that kind of patriotism.
When people leave to go and fight [without enforced conscription] - that's surely one of the most patriotic things a body can do. When they accept that thier single, brutally ended, almost unregarded, unnecessary [often] death can potentially save their families from being taken/destroyed, and their country from being overrun by the enemy, there is little more that they can do to prove their utmost belief in, and love for their country.
*note: I don't understand how people can do that, or how they have done it. Most people aren't instilled with such a great love for their country that they'd die for it any day of the week if it were necessary - perhaps it is mainly war that calls out/creates patriotism.

These people fight because they have people they love who they desire to protect, but also because they love their country and [many?] of its values.

So, question. What happens when you LOSE your respect for your country's values? What do you do when your country allows a collapse of basic morals? What about when the country fails to uphold these values/morals? By 'the country' I mean the leaders who set a standard, of which the people follow/exceed.
If you have a stronger sense of right and wrong, do you continue to be patriotic to a country that you can't assimilate yourself with?

But there are difficulties.

Surely you *are* patriotic if you are so dissulusioned with the way society is working. Thus went the argument.

I reckon you're a patriot if you want to do something about the way society works, to change it for the better. You quit being patriotic if you decide the country's so bad it can't be fixed/you don't want to fix it [because you dislike it so much], then you've effectively damned the country [and possibly, yourself].

What do you think makes a patriot? Do you consider yourself to be patriotic/a patriot, and if so, why?

Streams of Consciousness

The truth: I don't know what to write. I'm sitting here, curled up on the top bunk of the bed in my room. It's 1:01 in the morning and I know I've killed the deadline by an hour, but I also know it doesn't matter, so long as I can get something typed on here. So my brain's skimming through possible concepts and blog-unworthy ideas: the possibilities of writing about isolation at uni, the way women view themselves externally, the cobwebby mysteries of Bronte, fashion and why women put themselves through it, whether a woman's beauty is a man's perception or an extrinsic reality, the idiocy of abortion, loneliness, and baking.

Beware: Stream-of-consciousness begins..

It's past one of the clock. My brain (so useful during the day) is of little help to me now. I really ought to have dreamed up something to write about during the day.

Why do people write, anyway? Why does it matter whether you or I or anyone else on the blogosphere, or in the rest of the literary world, bothers to type out a few vague ideas, a couple of poorly-strung together sentences? There are millions of blogs. Billions of minds that feel the need to express what they feel. But then, what would happen if millions of people suddenly lost the need to express themselves in writing?

Perhaps it would result in a suffocation of readers, who need stimuli to create mutations of ideas in their own minds. After you have read something, much of what you are left with is ideas and concepts.

We are intrinsically social creatures - made that way. I suppose that most of our lives are spent in a certain isolation, all those thoughts locked inside our brains. Only a few of them ever gain expression and the rest are stored away in some compartment of our minds, waiting to be expressed or meditated on someday.

There is something about writing that clears your mind and organizes it. Unless you are writing in a stream of consciousness, you are forcing your brain to order information and see each idea clearly. It is the same for reading: when reading something well-structured your mind accepts information more speedily. Speaking is similar, however it is not so necessary to be accurate when speaking: other people can fill in gaps for you of information they know already.

If we didn't write we would lose a part of what it is to be human.

The West's Ageing Population - what can we do about it?

Every 'advanced' Western society around the world has a common problem: the number of babies being born are increasingly lessening, while the number of people dying outnumber them in these countries.

So what's the problem?

There are many economic issues that this fact causes - one being that because of the scarcity of young people, there will be many more old people who will retire, then need money from their governments. And where does the money come from? From young people who will be taxed harder because they will be supporting a huge number of old people.

Another is that there will be so few young people, making it necessary for immigration laws in these countries to be slacked, as more youthful workers will be needed to pay for the aged. This causes problems too: while population decreases in the countries these immigrants come to, the immigrants themselves are likely to quickly re-populate the country, helping to cause divisions due to religious differences, cultural rights and diminishing the heritage of the new country they live in.

Here are some greatly disturbing facts from Stats NZ:

"The changing age structure of New Zealand’s population is inextricably linked with

a projected decrease in births and a projected increase in deaths. Births exceeded

deaths by about 30,000 in 2005 (June year), but deaths are projected to outnumber

births from the early 2040s."

the stats keep coming:

"The 65+ age group is projected to make up over one-quarter of New Zealand’s

population from the late 2030s"

and this, also chilling:

"The 65+ age group is projected to make up over one-quarter of New Zealand’s

population from the late 2030s, compared with 12 percent in 2005." (find the info here)

BBC News enlightens us to the never-before-seen situation in Italy (the vanguard of birth control and abortion, it would seem..)

"By mid-century there may be one pensioner for every one productive worker in Italy, which begs a simple, devastating question: how on earth is Italy going to maintain its pensions system?"

"...When will Europeans wake up to the implications of consistently low birth rates? Well, in the words of one European professor of population studies, probably not until they are all in their wheelchairs and they suddenly realise there is no one left to push." (read the whole article here)

This part of the article shocked me:

"Demographers calculate that by 2050 the current population of 56 million could have dwindled to 40 million."

I can guess why all this is happening. Can you?

Do you think this trend can be reversed, and if so, how should it be done?