ROME, July 1, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – Several days ago, I came across an article that said someone had figured out why the world’s populations of bees are dying. It’s a virus, they said, that causes all the bees in a hive to suddenly drop dead. They are calling it Colony Collapse Disorder and agrarians and biologists are worried. Without bees a lot of crops can’t get pollinated. If the bees keep dying, eventually we won’t just have more expensive food; we’ll have no food.
It’s one of the best illustrations I’ve ever come across of the principle that all life, from microbes and viruses to humans, is part of an interconnected, and interdependent, web. All life has value, as part of its nature because of its divine origins: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God.” A bee doesn’t fall to the ground dead without the Father’s knowledge and without affecting everything around it. How much more is the loss of every one of us made in the image of the Father?
By 1965, a year before I was born, Christian civilisation was vast and ancient. It had created a social organisation and way of life that took centuries of concerted effort to destabilise. And even when its underpinnings had been eaten away it took decades for the real collapse to start.
I have long been a fan of disaster movies. I particularly like the ones where a lone investigator discovers and desperately tries to warn the world of a coming global catastrophe: a comet about to hit the earth, a colossal shift of the earth’s crust, a sudden ice age, a massive tidal wave that wipes out the eastern seaboard. In those movies, it is nearly always the government that is trying to cover it up.
I can relate.
When I left my home town in my early 20s, I started to understand the global nature of what was happening to the world. Being a child of English people, and raised in an English colonial town, I started following the British and European news and it sank in, slowly, that there was no place to run. Whatever it was that was eating our civilisation, whatever philosophical infection was killing us, was everywhere.
When I started writing for LifeSiteNews.com, I especially took an interest in British news, and it was like following the fall of a civilisation. Like a colossal, slow-motion CG clip of Los Angeles sliding into the Pacific.
It has finally become undeniable that the human form of the bee disease, Christian Civilisational Collapse Disorder, a lethal combination of materialist utilitarianism, nihilism, cultural Marxism, relativism, secularism – was moving out of the confines of medical ethics and law, and metastasizing into every conceivable aspect of our social existence. And in nearly every country in the world.
The social order that Christendom created is giving way, and the barbarism it replaced 200 centuries ago is coming back.
I grew up in one of the most beautiful places in the world; Victoria, British Columbia, a small city on the extreme westernmost edge of North America, on an island. If you start on the west coast of Vancouver Island and keep going west, you’ll hit the East; after us, there’s only Japan.
When I was a kid, Victoria was still populated by the elderly daughters of the first settlers. The little old ladies who made the city famous for its gardens lived, usually alone, in the elegant Edwardian manses built by their fathers. Going to school on the bus, it was common to see them get on with their shopping carts. In those days, believe it or not, they still wore flowered hats and white gloves.
My grandparents, born in 1897 and 1903, came to the Island in the 1920s and were part of the pioneer generation that built their own homes in sunny, secluded spots, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. I spent much of my childhood in their house, taking tea with the ladies in the neighbourhood, exploring the black volcanic rocks on the beach, bringing home fossils, flint arrowheads, sea shells and wild berries collected in the woods. Every day, my grandparents watched the evening news after supper, but I rarely paid attention. There were always art books to pore over, or games to play or stories to write.
All the years I was growing up in the Shire, I never gave the slightest thought to what was going on in the world outside this small, idyllic, luminescent world. Many native Victorians never leave the Island – quite a few of my schoolmates still live there – and I certainly had no plans to do so. What happened on “the mainland,” which meant the rest of the world that wasn’t the Island, was not our business. But as Tolkein put it, the shadow was growing.
I went back to the Island in the 1990s with a hope of staying, but it was too late. Despite the insularity of Victorians, the disease had spread across the Georgia Straight. The little old ladies in the flowered hats and gloves had died and few of them had children to maintain the old culture. All that was left was a tawdry facsimile, a kind of parody of the old English colonial life I had known and loved, plastered on government tourist brochures.
Someone had destroyed the Shire from within and had turned it into a kind of Hobbit theme park. You could take tea at the Empress Hotel followed by a tour of the Garden City in a red double decker bus, but there was no more social reality behind it.
That social reality, as I finally understood in my 30s, was Christendom, the civilisation that the Church had sponsored, and the disease is killing it everywhere.
In those disaster movies, the hero is usually one whistleblower and very often he spends the whole course of the movie trying to tell everyone what’s going to happen. He is nearly always an Everyman kind of person, just a regular bloke with a normal job who finds out about the coming catastrophe for no reason he can really understand, and who can do nothing to stop it. In nearly every film, after sounding the general alert, he ends up rescuing a few members of his own family, and watching helplessly as the comet hits the earth.
I don’t know if Christendom, the Shire that I remember, can be saved as a global social order. If it can, I don’t know how. I don’t know what is going to happen next or what all this is going to lead to. I just know what my job is. The news we cover gets darker and more like a dystopian novel every week. And there’s more and more of it all the time. The slide into the Pacific is gaining speed.
I have lived in Europe now for six years and have watched closely as the disease has taken down structure after structure, eaten through legal, cultural and social edifices built centuries ago, that had held up our whole world. It’s been my job to write about as much of it as possible, blaring away on Ezekiel’s Trumpet as hard as I can. I keep thinking of a line from one of those movies, Ian Holm played a scientist who discovered the Catastrophe and his last words to the hero were, “Save as many as you can.”
LSN has always understood its role as the guy who discovered the disaster coming and spends the whole movie trying to save as many and as much as we can. And it’s working. At least, our little bit of the Great Project to Save the Humans is actually going only too well. I was told we had something like almost five million pageviews in May. Whatever is going to be done to save the world, at least we can know that our part of the work is getting done now.
The only problem we have now is, as the video you doubtless saw, that we’re simply overreaching what we can do – stretched every which way imagineable and unable, for the moment, to stretch any further. The more we do, the more we learn we need to do – urgently, and with our whole heart and soul.
To cover the whole world, we have divided it up between our little group of writers. In Europe, we have me full time, and one part time volunteer in Paris. That’s it for this continent. In Mexico, Latin America and the Spanish-speaking world, we have Matthew Hoffman. We have a several more in the US and Canada, one in Australia and recently we have been blessed to acquire another volunteer in New Zealand. So, that’s two for all of Oceania.
Here’s the pitch: we are in great of more staff and just about everything else that is involved in running this type of top notch news service.
We need to keep going, reaching more people in more languages and more countries. We give a voice to people around the world who are heard in no other venue.
We are getting to be the go-to outfit for people in obscure corners of the globe trying desperately to get news to the outside world of attacks on human life, on marriage and human dignity. And we need to keep doing it. Many are pleading for us to do this.
I’m told that our site stats have gone through the roof in the last couple of years. We’re reaching more people than I could possibly have imagined nine years ago when I started.
I’m getting emails with news tips from people in countries I’d never heard of ten years ago. The other day, I spent most of an afternoon tracking information, in the Cyrillic alphabet, on the political machinations of the Culture Wreckers in Macedonia. I’ll let you in on a secret: I don’t read Macedonian.
We could use some help. Actually, lots of help, but to whatever degree, large or small, that you are capable of.
If you have not yet done so, and maybe never done so before, could you please make a donation to LifeSiteNews so that we can at least make the goal of a minimum of 3500 donors and at least $150,000 that will keep us going until the next campaign.
Maybe you can give a large donation. But then, even if you can give only $5, we would be ever so delighted and grateful.
Hilary White
European and Rome correspondent
LifeSiteNews.com