The family situations of the now infamous British moms Karen Matthews (left) and Fiona MacKeown (lower right) illustrate just how hopeless are the tragedies produced by our post-modern culture. Melanie Phillips describes the plight in "Reaping the Whirlwind" for the Daily Mail (U.K.)....Karen Matthews, mother of the missing schoolgirl Shannon who thankfully was discovered alive and well a few days ago, referred to her daughter and one of her other six children as ‘twins’. These children are actually aged nine and ten.
But Ms Matthews says they are twins because she thinks that’s what you call children who have the same father. With seven children by five different men, she seems to have no idea of what having the same father actually means.
This little vignette is as frightening as it is illuminating. It reveals not merely ignorance of some pretty basic facts about reproduction. Far worse, one of the most fundamental and universal features of human society - the connection between children and their fathers - is something which Ms Matthews does not appear even to register.
Cases like this expose the lethal hole at the heart of our society. There has been a great deal of criticism of Ms Matthews’s household arrangements, as well as the ‘unconventional’ lifestyle of Fiona MacKeown, mother of the 15-year-old girl murdered in Goa, who produced nine children by five different fathers...
These women have feelings no less than anyone else, after all. The problem is that these feelings have been channelled into the most twisted tributaries so that the very essence of love - putting the interests of someone else first - and the disciplines of everyday life that are essential to safeguard those interests, are to them a closed book.
The reasons this has happened go far beyond mere criticism of individuals. For these events reveal the existence of an underclass which is a world apart from the lives that most of us lead and the attitudes and social conventions that most of us take for granted.
But it is an underclass which affluent, complacent, materialistic Britain has created.
An underclass composed of whole communities where committed fathers are so rare that any child who actually has one risks being bullied. Where sex is reduced to an animal activity devoid of love or human dignity, and boys impregnate two, three, four girls with scarcely a second thought.
Where successive generations of women have never known what it is to be loved and cherished by both their parents throughout their childhood. How can such women know how to parent their own children?
These children are simply abandoned in a twilight world where the words ‘family’ or ‘relatives’ lose all meaning, as the transient men passing through their mothers’ lives leave them with an ever-lengthening trail of ‘step-fathers’ or ‘uncles’ who have no biological connection with them whatsoever.
Shannon has been found; but, tragically, with a background of such emotional chaos she will remain a lost child...
(H/T: Dr. Greg Gardner)
