I have an Italian friend who only recently immigrated (legally) to the United States. He is an only child. His mother is an only child and her father was an only child. His father had one sibling and he has one first cousin.
My friend is a living example of the ongoing demographic collapse of the Italians, the likes of which I dont think we have seen in the West since the Black Death of the 14th Century or the fall of the Roman Empire.
For some reason the Italians seem to have lost the desire to live. Or at least to make new Italians and thus for Italy to remain Italian. There appears to be no apparent vibrancy. No collective drive to see their people secure and strong in their ancestral lands. They seem to have fallen asleep atop one of the richest cultural traditions on the planet, content to… what?
Single, childless thirty-five-year-olds dressing like twenty-year-olds, hanging out with their thirty-five-year-old single childless friends to have a few drinks in the evening still acting like they are twenty-year-olds, talking gibberish when they should be home tucking their wee bairns into bed and otherwise cultivating the next generations of Italians and sweating bullets about the future like normal people.
Whatever they are talking about over their grappa or in their chat groups will not be about the future of Italy because they are not contributing anything to it. They dont have a stake in it.
So who are the Italians today and what are they living for other than just living? If not the security of their offspring then what is that transcendent thing or idea that gives them purpose? From the outside looking in, the Italian state appears to exist for the benefit of its own entrenched bureaucracy whose purpose is itself, and that survives by feeding on the people’s vitality via taxation and regulation.
The Italians themselves seem content to obey its every dictate like sheep in exchange for a comfortable hammock in which to live and expire unmourned.
The Italians appear to have not only abandoned a Christian faith that does give purpose, they appear to have abandoned an awareness of their own past and to be unmoved by its glories. The same could be said of the Spanish and French.
As a result the peoples that are the natural stewards of the Western tradition are failing in that very task.
We Southerners should not follow suit. And I include the native African sons of Dixie as well as all the transplants and immigrants who ‘get’ the South and see its deep strength. While we cannot protect the geographic heart of Western Christendom, the South (like Eastern Europe and large parts of Africa) is a bastion of the faith. A faith that does give purpose and whose philosophy is rational, humane, and fruitful.
What the wise man said thousands of years ago remains true. Where there is no vision, the people perish.
M.C. Atkins
Follow me on Facebook by clicking here.
Follow me on Facebook by clicking here.
Look Away... 