On Being Forgotten: A Sunday Reflection

Alfie Evans is a nondescript moniker. In a year or two, only a handful of people on this planet will remember a British baby by that name. In a generation, perhaps no one will remember — apart from two middle-aged people named Tom and Kate, whose youthful hopes for their first child together were crushed, not by Alfie’s terrible illness, which would have been sad but commonplace, but by the heavy bludgeon of the progressive authoritarian “democracy” in which they had the misfortune of living when their unhealthy son was born.

Unfortunately, the misfortune of those young parents — having been born in a progressive authoritarian “democracy” — is also commonplace. In fact, it is the plight of almost the entire civilized world today, if we discount straight-up tyrannical one-party states from the ledger of the civilized world for the purposes of political conversation, as we properly must. 

And Alfie’s brutal murder by forced starvation and thirst at the hands of a merciless, bloodless State is nothing strange either; nor is the fact that the afterglow of his murder, in general human consciousness, will be shortlived. For government killing of the “useless,” the socially sub-optimal, and the “no longer viable,” at the hands of administrative state experts, and in response to a utilitarian calculus of the value of a given individual soul to the State, is as routine today — and as blithely overlooked and euphemized — as our ubiquitous alcoholism, mindless hedonism, and nihilistic materialism.

Allowing the State to decide whose life is worth living, and to terminate any life deemed unworthy, is just one of the things we do in our modern advanced nations. We call it euthanasia (“good death”) or palliative care, and insist, right along with our duly elected and appointed mass murderers, that it is done “in the best interests of” the victim, and therefore to be accepted without a second thought — preferably without a first.

In memory of those souls we have forsaken, I offer a few pictures of spring, which, we may hope, is the season with which those individuals are rewarded, eternally, on the other side, in compensation for the cold winter or searing desert through which they were forcibly separated from their bodies by the rest of us, in our earthly progressive “caring.”