'Easier , murder
Sir: May I add a point or two to Mr Gadd's letter on easier murder? (July 15). The suggestion that the British people are turning with reduced compunction to the destruction of their fellows is supported by the latest figures from the Home Office, as well as those from Ulster, but there are other and more important contributory factors than the abolition of capital punishment. Human life, regarded as an homogeneous commodity, is at present a drug on the market, as any conservationist can tell you, and there is no age-group which has not its particular foe. For the unborn there is the medical profession, simultaneously inventing safer methods of abortion at an advanced stage and more sophisticated means of bringing premature babies to term. Watch the familiar speculative question "boy or girl?" replaced by the deliberative "abortion or baby?"
For infants there are the economists, who wish to see mothers at work, and the manufacturers of consumer goods, who wish to see them spending the money thud earned. Watch the figures on battered babies rise. For schoolchildren we have the lethal combination of compulsory education to the age of consent (and beyond, if recent suggestions are heeded, and it reverts to the old level of fourteen years), the increasingly permissive, unsupervised, and intellectually empty nature of that education, and the increasing size of the schools, encouraging the herd instinct, social anonymity, and gangsterism. Watch one comprehensive after another slip into anarchy. The young adult is the favoured being for whose devotion all gods compete. He has nothing to fear save the blossoming of his own proclivities and those of his kind. 'Watch the figures relating to fatal road accidents, hard drug-addiction, unmotivated murder, religious hysteria, and syphilis as regards this group. The middle-aged, always the backbone of society, must accord ingly bear the burden of society's ills. The sense of impotence and inherited guilt which this engen ders has recently been reinforced by the combined but unrelated evils of the much-publicised ' ge neration-gap ' and, for the greater part of the male population, employment which is undemand ing, insecure, highly paid, and inherently repulive. Watch the suicide rate among this group, particularly in areas where high unemployment " alternates or toexists with massive overtime. ' The aged ate menaced on the one hand by inflation and on the other by geriatric science. A pensioner whose contributions lie too far in the past becomes a parasite, since it is work that produces wealth, whereas investment produces only the means 'for others to work and paper money. A parasite will eventually be treated as such; watch for rises in the proportion of retired people in the population, and the activities of euthanasia societies.
Against such a background, wanton murder of members of an alien group takes on the guise of an innocuous pastime. While the intellectual leaders of society' persist in treating people as the. depersonalised raw material of sta-, tistics, while exalting the virtues of self-expression, the value of the individual and idealism as such, one can only marvel that anomie,, paranoia, and schizophrenia have claimed so few human victims.
C. N. Gilmore 197 Woodstock Road, Oxford
Previous page
