Girl 14 Drives Drunk Parents Disabled - Road to the Middle Class

THE BRITS HAVE been enjoying the spectacle of the family from hell, the Blacks, whose daughter Leighanne got arrested and then convicted for driving under the influence without a license. What’s the fuss, you ask? Leighanne is only 14, and this is her second driving offense.

The fair Leighanne is a bit young for driving and drinking, it’s true. But that is not why she became famous.

She got famous because of the forcible manner in which she expressed exception to her sentence: she shouted abuse at the magistrates and then threw a carafe of water over them, before punching the prosecuting counsel.

That’s more like it. And then her mother “mooned” the journalists attending upon this solemn occasion.

But that is not the point. The point is that, according to Ron Liddle in the London Spectator, her parents, Nora and Maurice, are both disabled.

Nora and Maurice are on benefits on account of his cancer and angina and her lung trouble and high blood pressure.

Oh well, Nora is 54 and Maurice is 62. Maybe they need to slow down a bit. It’s all perfectly harmless. But there are 2.7 million Brits on disability, around nine percent of the work force of 30 million. Only about 900,000 are unemployed. A pretty sickly lot, those Brits.

Here in the United States, things are far different. Out of a work force of 150 million a mere 8.1 million under 65 are drawing benefits under the Disability Income and Supplemental Security Income programs. That’s a mere 5.4 percent.

Let us put this in perspective. In Britland, there are about three times as many people getting money from the government for disability as there are people unemployed. In the ruthless United States, the ranks of the disabled are about the same as the ranks of the unemployed.

What does that tell you?

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems… No more rules, no more models… Genius conjures up rather than learns… ” —Victor Hugo
César Graña, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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