When Evil Eclipses Good

Last Monday I wrote something fairly positive about Iceland’s culture, but before you make plans to move there, there’s more news. I wrote that their drug and alcohol use among teens has gone down. There were a couple of main features of that success: involving youth in positive activities, and getting families to spend more time together.

But what happens when the family doesn’t pass along the basic values required for civilization? Those are valuing God, life, family, property, and truth.

The news, right after last Monday’s post, was this CBS News headline: “Iceland is on pace to virtually eliminate Down syndrome through abortion.”

Now, if you’re a normal human, you would think that eliminating Down syndrome would include something related to therapy, or maybe genetic engineering. Something that would alleviate the difficulties people with Down syndrome face, right?

Instead, this skewed view rejoices in eliminating the syndrome by eliminating the people who have it. Iceland, along with Denmark and China, have lowered to near zero the number of births with Down syndrome—by preventing the birth of those with Down syndrome. They kill them.

As Alexandra DeSanctis said at National Review:

But Iceland isn’t “eliminating Down syndrome” at all. It’s eliminating people. The callous tone of the piece makes selective abortion sound like a technological innovation rather than what it really is: the intentional targeting of “unfit” persons for total elimination.

They have done nothing to improve the lives of those with Down syndrome; they have given up on that—even though people born with Down syndrome are living and enjoying happy and productive lives wherever we find them. They have decided these people are subhuman and not worth allowing to live. 

A Special Olympics event from 2006. Our kids, and other
youth from church volunteered at this event for several years.

Lest we feel superior for not being like Iceland, the US rate for aborting Down syndrome babies is at least 67%. So two out of every three of these precious babies is killed, maybe as many as 9 out of 10. British moms kill 90% of babies prenatally diagnosed with Down syndrome. Europe averages 92%.

France is approaching totality. They recently banned a video in which people with Down syndrome were portrayed living happy lives—because it hurt the sensibilities of the women who had aborted their Down syndrome babies.

This is the video: “Dear Future Mom” from 2014 World Down Syndrome Day:

Sometimes a comparison helps us see more clearly. Let’s say that science came up with a way to assess, with a prenatal test, which babies were at risk for developing type 1 diabetes. It’s a lifelong trial. There are health issues involved through one’s entire life. There are resources that need to go toward medication and testing. Maybe an insulin pump. What if somebody decided to declare those lives not worth living, and that it would be a kindness to prevent the suffering by killing anyone with the genetic predisposition?

Does that do anything to further medicine? Or improve the lives of diabetics? Think about the people you know (there are probably several) who are type 1 diabetics. Do you wish they had never been born? Would the world have been better off without Mary Tyler Moore, Peter O’Toole, baseball legend Jackie Robinson, author Anne Rice, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor? Would they have been better off never living, rather than living a life with the limitations of diabetes?

We might not find as many Down syndrome people who are famous for major accomplishments. But there are a great many people among us who aren’t famous for our accomplishments. More likely we are significant to those we work and live among, and especially to those we love.

People with Down syndrome can learn, and can be healthy. Sometimes minor surgeries are required. Sometimes therapies can help. NACD.org does brain research and develops exercises for a wide range of brain disorders. They teach parents to do the therapy, because frequency, intensity, and duration are required for brain change, and that means daily—sometimes more than once daily—exercises, where a weekly visit to a therapist just isn’t enough. Their results show that Down syndrome people can be developed to average levels—which is enough to graduate from high school, do productive work, and carry out fulfilled lives.

If there were a push to actually “eliminate” Down syndrome, it would be to further these therapies, which help not only Down syndrome people, but a range of other health issues as well. That would be worth celebrating.

There’s a particular talent common to a high percentage of Down syndrome people. It’s obvious to anyone who has spent time among them. It is their ability to love those around them. They give and accept love without limits. And, while they can experience a full range of emotions, they often choose to be happy. (See this video: “Happy” from 2014 World Down Syndrome Day. And while you’re at it, check out this one: “Not Special Needs,” from this year.)

This pretty girl is the daughter of a friend.
She just turned 1. It's hard to
imagine a world without this sweet face.

Some Down syndrome people, in my experience, have spiritual strength beyond many (maybe most) of us. There are several sacred stories of these special people having a connection to heaven that I won’t tell here. But here’s a quote from a young Down syndrome girl who was asked what she thought about God.

I love God.

I can hear him in my mind.

I can hear his finest whispers.

He says He loves me too.

This is not the kind of thinking that comes from someone so subhuman she should not be allowed to be born. This is someone worthy of love, who is contributing to our civilization.

If there were a genetic test for those who would become eugenicists, that might be useful knowledge. Not so we could kill them while they are still innocent, but so that we could do therapy—with the frequency, intensity, and duration that retrains the brain—to teach them not to choose that murderous path. 

More Post-Apocalyptic Tyrannies

Lately it seems like every book I pick up (often young adult novels and series) is someone’s imagining of a post-apocalyptic tyrannical society. I read The Hunger Games a couple of years ago, but the movie came out last spring, so I revisited that series (and might again as each movie in the series comes out). Plus, Mr. Spherical Model just got around to reading them—one after another, just like the rest of us did (no one can read just one).

This past year I read the Matched trilogy, by Ally Condie. Since Christmas I’ve picked up The Mazerunner, the first in a series by James Dashner, and Incarceron, the first in a series by Catherine Fisher. And this past weekend I finished Glenn Beck’s latest (with Harriet Parke), Agenda 21.

Here’s what post-apocalyptic tyranny stories seem to have in common: Some historical event changed things—a war, an uprising, maybe a pandemic. Whatever it was (and sometimes the characters don’t know what it was), some scary chaos was “resolved” by the authority, for which everyone is required to be grateful. Allegiance to an entity other than the authority—such as God or family—is discouraged or forbidden (or forced underground).

There is an all-pervasive authority, monitoring all behaviors, and controlling most choices. Reading and writing tools are often missing or strictly controlled. Food is provided, pre-made, regardless of personal taste (or sometimes size and other nutritional need differences). Marriage choices are controlled by the authority—which has eugenic purposes. Personal belongings are discouraged or prevented. Understanding of how to subsist without the help of the government is extinguished. Schooling, if allowed, is scrupulously controlled by the authority to indoctrinate with authority doctrine, and generally weeding out any differences, innovations, or creative thinking. Beauty, art, and open-minded science are absent or strictly controlled.

Everyone is ostensibly equal. But there are always those with more power, who exert authority over the plebeians, and who also enjoy privileges—better food, better technology, better living conditions.

Life is cheap and disposable—particularly for anyone born with imperfections, anyone who has developed an illness that requires significant treatment resources, and anyone who rebels against the authority. Even when these societies appear on the surface to be “civilized,” they are, either visibly or just below the surface, savage and inhuman.

Usually the main characters begin with a lack of understanding or awareness. They’re just busy going day to day, moment to moment, without getting into trouble. Somewhere along the way, the stakes get higher—often with a threat to a loved one. Then they rise to heroism out of necessity of the higher goal of human love, to some combination of thwarting/changing the authoritarian society or escaping from it with the hope of something better outside.

Most of these stories are fictional warnings, someone’s imagination of worst-case scenarios. Glenn Beck’s book is essentially that as well, but with the hint that it is based on real possibilities. In the Afterword, he explains that Agenda 21, the title, comes from an actual UN program. The fictional story is simply a way to illustrate where such a plan could lead if followed to its logical inevitable conclusions. He lists nine basic principles that the real Agenda 21 intends to pursue, some of which we can already see evidence of in current policies:

1.      Move citizens off private land and into high-density urban housing.

2.      Create vast wilderness spaces inhabited by large carnivores.

3.      Reduce traffic congestion and slash fuel use by eliminating cars and creating “walkable” cities.

4.      Support chosen private businesses with public funds to be used for “sustainable development.”

5.      Make policy decisions that favor the greater good over individuals.

6.      Drastically reduce the use of power, water, and anything that creates “carbon pollution.”

7.      Use bureaucracies to make sweeping decisions outside of democratic processes.

8.      Increase taxes, fees, and regulations.

9.      Implement policies meant to incentivize a reduced population (i.e., “one-child” type laws). [p. 281 of Beck's book]

In "Agenda 21: The Earth Summit Strategy to Save Our Planet," Dan Sitarz gives this rather frighteningly frank goal statement:

Effective execution of Agenda 21 will require a profound reorientation of all human society, unlike anything the world has ever experienced—a major shift in the priorities of both governments and individuals and an unprecedented redeployment of human and financial resources. This shift will demand that a concern for the environmental consequences of every human action be integrated into individual and collective decision-making at every level. [quoted on p. 279 of Beck's book]

There was one quote in the Afterword that may merit an economic post of its own in the future from the 1976 Vancouver Declaration:

[Land] cannot be treated as an ordinary asset, controlled by individuals and subject to pressures and inefficiencies of the market. Private land ownership is also a principal instrument of accumulation and concentration of wealth and therefore contributes to social injustice. [quoted on p. 282 of Beck's book]

There is something terribly wrong with the idea that accumulating wealth is evil because it is unequalizing. As I’ve written in the Economic section of the Spherical Model, “Wealth, simply, represents the accumulation of the results of labor.” A person’s wealth is only limited by his personal time, talents, and energy. When you take away the results of a person’s work, you are stealing from him the results of how he spends his life; that is slavery. Helping the poor with free giving can benefit both giver and receiver, but stealing from the producer to give to the non-producer benefits neither and discourages work and innovation. Concerning land, there’s the tragedy of the commons, where commonly owned land is always overused and resources are not guarded or developed (see Thomas E. Woods, 33 Questions about American History, p. 22).

As a review, I thought the Beck/Parke book was enjoyable and well written. As a story in the post-apocalyptic tyranny genre (is there such a genre now?), it stands up well. The possible realities underlying the story give it another layer of interest.

The scariest and most evocative of the tyranny books I’ve read are not fiction; they are the biographies and histories from WWII. I recommend Bonhoeffer, Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy, by Eric Metaxas, and Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, about Louis Zamperini, by Laura Hillebrand. We don’t have to rely on imagination to see what could happen in a savage tyranny; we have recorded evidence. We need to be aware, to prevent it from happening among us her in what is left of the free world.