Mike Donnellan
“In olden days a glimpse of stocking was something shocking now heaven knows, anything goes.”
“Anything Goes” Cole Porter 1934
Do you remember those days, when you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing a man or a woman declaring their love for a member of the opposite sex in a song? When a boy would carve a heart with an arrow through it in the bark of a sturdy tree with his and his girlfriend’s initials picked out on either side of it?
When firemen, policemen, and medics ran towards the scene of the disaster as others ran away without having to fill in a “hazard assessment form” beforehand? When a poor swimmer would unhesitatingly dive into the raging surf to rescue a drowning person or pet?
The film West Side Story, released in 1961, told a similar love story to Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, that of two ill-fated lovers from either side of a huge cultural divide; it won ten Oscars, one of them for best film, and was deemed to be “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” by the United States Library of Congress.
All this behaviour comes from society being rooted in the Christian concept of “love”, and in particular for rescue personnel, from Gospel phrases such as John 15:13 “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”
Well, all that lovey-dovey stuff – and as I feel Sigmund Freud would agree – comes from the heart, as any schoolboy who carves them on trees also knows. Or used to know. Freud would call it the “subconscious” rather than the heart, I suspect, in his haste to distance himself from any possible religious connotations.
It’s difficult to place a start date on what many would consider to be New Zealand’s arrival at the top of the slippery slope from where we’ve slithered all the way down to a situation of such “wokeness” that innocent people who speak of love and truth from the heart can be shouted down.
For want of any other date, however, I would place the start of it all somewhere in the late sixties when agitating for the easing of abortion laws began in New Zealand and which resulted in the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977.
Then among all the activity of the selling off of New Zealand’s “family silver” – power stations, New Zealand Rail etc – the “Homosexual Law Reform Act 1986” was given royal assent. And of course, once the crack(s) were opened – pun intended or not as you prefer – many got to work with their crowbars to widen them further and we have now reached a time where doctors are forbidden to ease the suffering of aborted babies born alive, no doubt in extreme pain; and where gays who are legally “married” are still prying away with their crowbars in their efforts to force Christian Churches to marry them.
These crowbar holders follow the lead from those of their ilk who’ve been pursuing Colorado baker Jack Phillips through the courts – at great expense to him. Their efforts to drive him into ruin and thus set an example to others have been going on for several years because he refuses to decorate a cake with what he deems to be against his principles as a Christian.
Then there’s the still simmering question of euthanasia, which appears to be in a similar situation currently as the Contraception, Sterilisation, and Abortion Act 1977 at the beginning, and which when modified in 2020 turned abortion more or less into a free for all.
When the New Zealand politicians who favour euthanasia regroup again in the not-so-distant future, you can be sure that instead of tightening it up, euthanasia legislation will follow the path of Canada where an elderly lady ringing up social services to see what help might be available to help keep her mobile, was offered government paid-for euthanasia. “To ease the pressure on our health service and give a person who wishes it, a dignified passing”, you understand. Such is “our democracy”.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonour others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
Corinthians 1:13
Where has “True Love” gone?
If you ask me, evil has snuck into the ‘education’ of children which endeavours to kill family life where true love (as opposed to disposal chute orientated ‘love’) is first experienced. That so-called education has in effect snipped the communication cord between an individual’s heart where true love resides (The HDD in computer lingo) and the mind (the RAM of the computer). So it surely isn’t surprising that all you can get out of those born and ‘educated’ after say 1960 (who are in effect zombies with their heart and thus capacity to love removed) is the last parroted observation they picked up off one of their peers (or the mainstream media) and which has been ‘written’ over the top of previous entries in their limited capacity RAM.
