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COMMENTARY
December 17, 2011
Helter skelter
Catholic high school kids showed the contemporary Christmas spirit in a Niagara Falls motel, last Friday night, leaving a trail of used condoms, beer bottles, broken glass, broken doors, smashed sinks, and holed drywall through most of the 35 rooms they'd rented for after a "semi-formal dance."Police cruised by, while the melee was in progress, but would not intervene in what they considered to be a civil matter. The motel owners, who have sustained substantial property damage, now hope to avoid the further cost of legal proceedings. They have asked parents to settle claims voluntarily. The kids themselves, like those who trashed the middle of Vancouver after last spring's Stanley Cup final, were still boasting of their achievement the morning after, with pictures and supercilious comments posted through the "social media." "Makes you proud," as a priest in Almonte said, when forwarding the first news link to me. An astute observer of the surrender of Catholic authority, in the schools and everywhere, I believe he was being droll. It happens I know several graduates of the high school in question: Notre Dame in Welland, Ont. By one of those, I am assured that while juvenile delinquency is an immortal feature of small-town life, the Internet-organized general rampage is rather a new thing. The practice of renting blocks of motel rooms for "after the dance" was just coming in about the time he graduated in 1986. He was not surprised by what happened, only by the cluelessness of the Facebook generation, who have so little conception of privacy, that they freely post self-incriminating pictures. Indeed, their narcissism, reinforced at every moment in both school and commercial environments, is so tragically advanced, that they are incapable of embarrassment. Let me contribute the typical remarks of an old geezer. The geezer in question would be me. "In my day," while he would not have feared this sort of property damage, the manager of a motel would not have let rooms to high school students for "after the dance." This is because he'd have guessed what said rooms would be used for (i.e. sex and drugs and rock and roll). Not that motel managers had higher moral standards then. They'd do things they thought they could get away with. They just wouldn't think they'd get away with this. That is because angry parents would have stormed the place when they found out what was going on. And in a town the size of Welland, they would find out quickly. Nor would the cops, if they were anything like the cops in my small Ontario town (Georgetown, Ont.), have gone gentle into that good night. Superciliousness, on the part of young offenders against the laws of God and man, was met instinctively with all the discipline their parents had apparently failed to mete, and corporal punishment could be extra-legal and quite spontaneous. Juvenile delinquents actually feared the police. The found-in kids would have be-come immediate candidates for borstals. Their parents would have been humiliated in the local paper, which would not have hesitated to publish the children's names and addresses. And the motel owner would have had his day in court on morals charges. This is hypothetical, however, for such an event would not have happened, anywhere in the Ontario of the generation before last. We had a legal and moral order that was organically consistent; one which has since been pulled apart by "progressive" social engineers, with results entirely predictable (and in fact predicted, by dinosaurs like me). Consider: these kids were mostly Grade 12, which is to say, they have attained the full age of 16 at which current provincial law puts them entirely beyond parental control (even while it still upholds some degree of parental liability). A parent has no right to look even at the child's medical records. The sex lives of these boys and girls, the procurement of contraceptives from the local drugstore, or of abortions at taxpayer expense from the local hospital, has been made no concern of mom or dad - any attempt by whom to intervene may itself be met with the full force of the law. That is the part of the iceberg that is visible above the water line. Below it floats the rest of the titanic social catastrophe. First-hand exposure to the life of our public schools - Protestant or Catholic makes no difference, given the general collapse of moral and religious authority - acquaints one with the rest of the story. Another correspondent predicts the reaction of the diocesan brass in Welland. The Roman clerics will say it was an "isolated event" and tell people not to gossip. And you may bet that none of the young charges, for whose religious formation they were institutionally responsible, has the fondest notion of such concepts as "virtue" or "purity" - except as subjects for mockery. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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