If you would like to read it, visit The Guild of Blessed Titus Brandsma.
Say a prayer for this 20-year-old who committed suicide after a short period of unemployment. That a young man should commit suicide due to lack of work is truly terrible and saddening.
6 comments:
Unemployment is very obviously a serious problem.
But that kind of anecdotal reasoning, if you are being serious, is crazy.
People commit suicide for a plethoa of reasons that do not cause suicide in the millions of others who suffer from the same ills.
Maybe I missed the sarcasm because the subject was so serious.
I am sorry if what I said is silly, but I do feel sorry for anyone whose sense of dignity which work gives is so sensitive that he despairs and ends his life.
I also think that austerity Britain, cuts, unemployment and workfare, suicides, in the age in which faith in God has been eclipsed so widely, will increase.
The 'work makes you free' idea is coming back.
It's not silly to "feel" sorry for someone, especially one who despairs in a moment of extreme stress. But it is silly to draw big conclusions about the nature of the world based on our emotion reaction to emotionally changed anecdotal events.
That kind of emotional thinking is a big part of why politicians and Church leaders are able to push their agendas so effectively. How many times have we hear a politician say in a speech something like, "Take the nice woman I met at the factory today, Sarah. Sarah is a single mother with four kids. Life is hard for Sarah right now…"
Tough cases make bad law.
It is of concern that so many young people now take their lives for apparent reasons which didn't drive me and my contemporaries to suicide: short-term unemployment, bullying at school, not having the right sort of appearance. One problem the vast majority of my generation didn't have was a broken home and I don't think society is willing to face up to the enormous psychological damage that the selfish 'lifestyle' choices of the post-war generation has had on their children and, now, grandchildren. Children may seem to take marital break-up and the loss of a parent with equanimity, but believe me they don't.
Sadly we live in a society which seems most concerned with maximising the 'choices' available to adults, destroying stable family life and marriage without much thought.
At my local 'family centre' they try to teach young people 'resilience'. I think when one looks at what certain generations were able to live through, the generation that has been taught to niether love nor fear God, or even think there is a God, are suffering an extraordinary lack of meaning, and an unanchoredness, and a definite lack of resilience. Meaning has been taken out of the Hands of our Creator Who want's us with Him in eternity, and placed in the charybdis of the nauseating vicissitudes of the world. We all need stability, and security, and the world cannot give it. It must be found in God, and hopefully evinced by His Church. Usually when someone tops themselves there are multiple factors involved as there must have been with this young man. Lord have mercy. But for the grace of God, there go so many of us.
Constant prayer (don't ever let a pope put you off the Rosary or 'rote' prayer), and having a healthy fear of God are no small mercy.
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