Aboriginal Families: Sincerely sorry!

“Sorry seems to be the hardest word” sang Elton John in one of his early hits. But the new Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, found it easy enough. As the first official parliamentary act of his government last week, he apologised to his Aboriginal countrymen in an eloquent and passionate speech. “For the indignity and degradation... inflicted on a proud people and a proud culture, we say sorry.” 

Many of Australia’s 500,000 Aborigines live in Fourth World conditions in a First 2008-02-13T062208Z_01_NOOTR_RTRIDSP_2_INTERNATIONAL-AUSTRALIA-POLITICS-ABORIGINES-DCWorld country. Life expectancy for them is 17 years lower than for the rest of Australia. The statistics for health, housing, literacy, infant mortality and employment are appalling. Last year the Federal Government spent A$3.8 billion on Aboriginal affairs and had precious little to show for it. No big deal. Neither had its predecessors.

Yet the Prime Minister was not apologising for any of this. Nor was he apologising for the theft of land, the murders, the discrimination, the neglect of the past 200-odd years since European settlement. Instead, he was apologising for wrecking Aboriginal families. An estimated 50,000 of their children were removed from their families between 1910 and 1970 – the so-called “Stolen Generation”. Rudd called it “one of the darkest chapters in Australia’s history”.

A thick 1997 report, Bringing Them Home, Mapoon_Boysbrought these stories to the attention of white Australians. As Rudd said, “There is something terribly primal about these firsthand accounts. The pain is searing; it screams from the pages. The hurt, the humiliation, the degradation and the sheer brutality of the act of physically separating a mother from her children is a deep assault on our senses and on our most elemental humanity.” 

PARENTS ANGRY OVER PEER SEX-ED INSTRUCTION

The battle over sex education in the United States continues, with some parents of students at a New Jersey high school challenging a programme that uses peer instructors. School district administrators say that New Jersey law requires them to teach a comprehensive class that addresses abstinence, safe sex, dating violence, HIV-AIDS, and how alcohol and drugs affect sexual decision-making. Healthy Choice But one of the objectors says her 14-year-old son was uncomfortable with a session in which a student taught the class how to put on a condom, using a banana. "Do you want a 16-year-old boy teaching your 14-year-old daughter" how to do this? asked Lisa Westerman.

When she asked to look at the programme, Clearview Regional High School gave this mother the 900-page Teen PEP (Prevention Education Program) instructors' manual, but said that it taught only parts of the curriculum. Families considering whether to let their children attend don't know what's in and what's out, she said.

Last year there 244 disputes over sex education across the country, up from 204 in 2006, according to the lobby group the Sex Information and Education Council of the US. Programmes limited to teaching abstinence until marriage and not promoting contraception have been popular in many states, which receive federal funding for them. A further $141 million dollars is available for this year, but some states are forfeiting the money and reverting to so-called comprehensive sex-ed on the pretext that abstinence courses have been proved ineffective.

'Social' websites implicated in another SUICIDE!

What appears to be a suicide cult has claimed anotherAngie Fuller victim in the Welsh town of Bridgend. (See the blog of January 28) Angie Fuller, 18, (picture) was found by her boyfriend, Joel Williams aged 21, hanged at the house they shared.  The pair were engaged to be married. Miss Fuller appears to be the 14th young person to have killed themselves in the past year in Britain. Her death follows that of Natasha Randall last month and six young men from the same area. The deaths have fueled concerns about young people's use of social networking sites -- many of the victims had sites on Bebo. Miss Fuller, who worked in a fashion clothing shop, used the websites. On her Facebook profile page she says: "I don't like myself, but hey who does? I'm an angry drunk."

A psychologist writing in the London Telegraph blames "social networking" online for "displacing key periods of emotional and social development with time in front of a screen" and producing social disengagement, loneliness and depression amongst young people. Dr Aric Sigman notes that the trend (in the UK at least) is "part of a growing privacy accentuated by record levels of divorce, the longest parental working hours in Europe, and children having fewer siblings than ever before." He also criticizes "a generation of parents who are determined not to appear uncool. And besides, they're too busy sharing similar tastes in music with their children, who they treat as their best 'mate

Father's essential role in upbringing confirmed

Fathers are often missing from family life and this puts their children at a considerable disadvantage, as research over the last 20 years shows. A Swedish team reviewed 24 published studies and found that active, involved fathers, or "father figures", protect boys from developing behavioural problems and girls from psychological problems.

Dad and Child

Regular, positive contact also reduced criminal behaviour among children in low-income families and enhanced their intellectual development. Children who actually lived with both a mother and father figure had fewer behavioural problems than those who lived with just their mother. Long-term, women had better relationships with partners and a greater sense of well-being at age 33 if they had a good relationship with their father at 16.

The researchers say they are not able to conclude exactly what kind of engagement the father figure needs to produce the positive effects. Nor are they sure if outcomes differ depending on whether the child lives with their biological father or with another father figure. They conclude that governments and employers need to come up with "father-friendly policies" that support the increased involvement of fathers in child-rearing

Where did universities come from?

When a group of students and professors refused to hear the pope speak at their Roman university they were denying their own tradition.

The conventional view nowadays regarding faith and reason is that there is simply no relationship between the two. It is inconceivable. The notion of a "rational" or "reasonable" faith is viewed as La Sapienza students support the pope at his Wednesday audience.an oxymoron. Consequently, any ethical judgment associated with a religious faith is deemed non-rational and irrelevant to those not sharing that faith.

 

In a lecture intended for delivery at La Sapienza University in Rome earlier last month, Pope Benedict XVI undertook to address this issue and to show that faith cannot exist without reason and that reason itself cannot flourish without the faith. His whole argument is based on the concept of the Western university, whose emergence in the Middle Ages was not some sheer historical fluke, but an outgrowth of the intellectual requirements of the Christian faith itself -- a point which suggests why universities did not develop in Asia, Africa or the Middle-East.

Perhaps we need to reflect on T.S. Eliot's observation about the relationship between Western culture and the Christian faith:

If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made. You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grandchildren: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.