KEY POINTS:
Has this nation lost its soul? The answer has to be yes. And confirmation came last Friday in a letter to the editor from a reader who said he woke up on a lovely spring morning, then read my column, and it ruined his day. He accused me
of breeding negativity and suggested I write about some of the "positive daily achievements of our society".
In other words: Don't trouble me with all the nasty things that are going on, I just want to enjoy life. Which is an attitude obviously held by most New Zealanders these days and helps to explain why so little is ever done to solve, rather than just tinker with, the virulent social ills afflicting us.
But, thank God, there are still some who are aware, as shown by the 30-plus emails I received this week from readers who share my concern.
The measure of a society's soul is the way it treats its most vulnerable members - children, the elderly, the poor and the disabled - and on this measure we fail miserably.
Children by the thousand are being physically and sexually abused, too often gruesomely murdered, and deprived of the necessities of life.
The elderly are under increasing attack from sexual and physical violence, even by members of their own families.
The gap between rich and poor is widening, depriving many of the right to live even a subsistence life and forcing many to work so hard that family life is non-existent. And the disabled are too often the target of predators, manipulators and exploiters while a careless and politically correct Government deprives hundreds of the opportunity to be usefully employed.
Why? There is one overriding reason: we are three-dimensional beings; we consist of body, mind and spirit, and most of us ignore our spiritual selves. Which explains why so many people who have all they need and more of money, property and prestige, remain restless and dissatisfied, uneasily aware that there has to be more to life than this. Many resort to drugs and booze. There was a time when Judeo-Christian virtues and values, including the sanctity of life, were accepted without question. Most children went to Sunday school, whether their parents accompanied them or not. Thus were the traditions of morality and behaviour upon which the health of society depends passed from generation to generation.
Nowadays only a small fraction of the populace attends church, and many churches have closed their children's ministry because of lack of interest - a significant factor in the loss of those absolutes that once made this nation a world leader in social development. That has led to the loss of the nation's soul, the unravelling of our moral fibre to the extent that there are but a few strands left. It has let loose the destructive forces of sexual immorality, individual selfishness and rampant greed.
It started in the 1960s when liberal Justice Minister Ralph Hanan covered divorce proceedings in secrecy, leaving married folk free to shag around without public opprobrium.
It accelerated with the birth-control pill which, although a great inventions, had its downside. Women could now shag around without fear of pregnancy, and thousands did.
But the one thing that accelerated our moral and social decline more than any other was the decriminalisation of abortion, which has deprived our nation of hundreds of thousands of potential New Zealanders in the past 30 years. That abortion law was so framed as to provide strict criteria, but they have never been strictly (or even loosely) enforced and open-slather abortion has long been a fact of life.
Our increasing child abuse problems stem directly from the legalisation of abortion; if we see the most vulnerable human being of all - the baby in the womb - as an inconvenience to be disposed of, what chance do living children have when, inevitably, they make a nuisance of themselves?
Many of the rest of our problems stem from the economic revolution of the 1980s, which went too far and too fast. It opened the way for the avaricious among us (and there are always plenty of those) to exploit their fellows to an unprecedented extent and has, more even than sexual immorality, contributed to the breakdown of that fundamental building block of a benign society, the traditional family.
That wasn't helped by the decriminalisation of homosexual activity and the subsequent brainwashing of the populace into believing that "marriages" between men and men or women and women have the same validity as heterosexual unions.
Television, too, has played a significant part in the breakdown of society as we knew it, with its concentration on sex, crime and violence and its constant parade of desirable consumables.
I believe that much of the violence that afflicts society, which reaches right down to the schoolyard, is a reflection of the frustration and anger that builds in those who want but can't have.
Then there's the porn-laden internet and vicious video games.
So what's to be done? I know we can't go back so, like the scientists who devise new antidotes for ever-evolving bugs, we must devise antidotes for our ever-increasing societal woes. If we don't, we face chaos and, like the Roman Empire, ultimate disintegration.
Perhaps a good start would be for parents to send their kids to Sunday school - any Sunday school. Then our next generations might at least resurrect their spiritual dimension, without which life is largely meaningless, and learn the timeless virtues and values that have throughout history make communities and nations great. It's not much, but it would be a start.
Let us pray...
