It seems you have had quite awful experiences.

Our discussion is becoming personal. If you wish to continue discussing it with me individually you are welcome to contact me via my blog http://www.wellbeingandhealth.net.

However our discussion is drifting from the topic of this post. So we need to either bring it back on topic or continue it in another venue.

The worst aspect of all this has been my exprience of the whole government led support structure biases entirely in favour of the mother, even if she is a bipolar psychotic. If I complained about her foul language and violence in front of the children to any authority, I was the one who was either threatened with eviction or arrest – even though I was the victim. As I’ve said elsewhere possession (of the children, 95% to the mother) is 9/10ths of the law and I can vouch for that.

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Sadly, most of all I fear for my two estranged children, torn from me when they were just 2 years, and 3 months old, respectively. It almost killed me and caused 12 years of panic attacks due to the stress of constantly frustrated contact. What I have seen them grow up to become in the last 16 years is a pair of smug, entirely self centred individuals. Both talented, academically gifted and highly intelligent but due to living with a permanently depressed bipolar mother they have little concept or interest in anything beyond the end of their noses. Show little or no gratitude for my 80,000 miles driving to maintain contact with them this last 9 years, due to my relocating, and are only interested in the depth of my wallet.

What hope for the future when a generation of entirely materialistic young people have no ideals, gratitude, empathy or sense of altruism? I don’t even get a Father’s Day or birthday card in recognition of my existence. Their mother has spent the entire last 18 years driving a wedge between my children and me, not to mention 120 miles distance. She didn’t even want children in the first place and now she has totally wrecked her life and body by ballooning to 300 lbs, while being kept alive by Warfarin – with permanent DVTs, one for each leg. Work for her is now out of the question. A fine self-respecting role model, now that both children are more than capable of looking after themselves and cooking a meal. Incapable of helping herself or her children and adamantly refusing to exercise, lose weight or get a job.

She has never got in the swimming pool with them their entire lives and leads a horizontal lifestyle in front of the TV, watching soaps and snacking all day, within a series of three brand new 3 bedroom houses during the last 16 years, (couldn’t get on peaceably with the neighbours – or me, even for the benefit of the children), courtesy of the family friendly state… “Moan, moan, moan”…(self inflicted cripple), “moan”.

“It’s life, Jim – but not as we know it!”. (Mr. Spock).

Is it any wonder I despair of the human race?

I mostly agree with your final paragraph (and the rest of what you say).

The thing I want to add is that many people want a world their children can be happy in. What is missing I think is an easy and effective way to make these desires real. To tell someone that they have to change the whole world isn’t good news.

Whether our civilisation – or even many of our species on our planet – will survive is very doubtful.

Thanks once again for you passionate and concerned comment.

Thank you for your empathetic response to my seeming tirade. Based on statistics alone, I believe that global society has lost any real sense of direction, and due to conflicting agendas is unable to visualise and act to avoid the inevitable, collective effect of its spiralling, destructive behaviour.

A macro-syndrome magnifying all the dysfunctional behaviour and habits of disturbed characters discussed in this excellent website. Global Political Myopia.

For instance: Population Control – it failed with China. It has no hope with India, and by 2020 both countries will constitute 3 billion people. Add to that the almost exponential growth levels of countries like Nigeria and you swiftly get to the hand wringing realisation of the UN – we are already past the point of no return. As all these emerging countries demand more of the goods they see on TV, we are also faced with a concomitant rising tide of 3rd world ‘me too’ consumerism.

How can mother earth indefinitely sustain such an irresponsible lack of what needs to be very painful UN enforced global policies, in order to sustain a population at below crisis levels?

The increasing demands for fuel, food and water are set for the last half of this century as the new harbingers of war, hunger and pestilence.

Sadly, in a way, I was brought up in an Armageddon-scenario religion as a boy. I left it years ago, through total disillusionment, but it still bangs the drum for a messiah-sourced benign dictatorship as the only hope for mankind because we have ‘lost our way’ – as if we ever knew it to begin with (?). Still, we can’t ignore the obvious evidence of man’s globally ‘collective insanity’ – an oblique reference perhaps to Jungian ‘Collective Unconscious’.

Freud said, 100 years ago, “Neurosis is the cost of Civilisation”.

I put it to you Evan, that neurotic, narcissistic, self-indulgent, materialistic societies, afraid of painful choices, will be the end of civilisation as we know it..? It’s not a mesmerising, sci-fi horror case of, “Watch the skies!” but more mundanely, simply, “Watch the News” – and read our collective social history as a species and join the dots…

Thanks for your comment. You obviously care deeply.

I agree with you about politicians not following through on their rhetoric. I would like to see limits on working hours for instance so that people have time to spend with their kids; and some kind of income or compensation for domestic labour so that both parents don’t need to work to afford a house.

Like you I also think that domestic violence can have awful consequences for those who witness it (the children) as well as those who suffer it. I hope that the stigma against reporting is disappearing – my guess is that men still aren’t reporting (though I have no evidence for this apart from the experience of my friends). My belief is that we could do much to help and educate people.

I do think that there are some who put in work to help families. Although with both parents needing to work the participation is charities and voluntary agencies is bound to decline.

Thankyou for a very heartfelt and passionate comment.

I’m afraid “It’s worse than that he’s dead Jim!”. To quote Bones McCoy in an early Star Trek. The family I mean, or at least on its last legs, in my experience.

A 40-50% divorce rate in the western world, many children conceived in marriage- less relationships, further weakening the bonds. All set for an increasingly self centred, unstable and disconnected life style. The proof is the increasing market for single adult homes – the detritus of divorce.

Social abortion at 200,000 per annum steady, in the UK alone, despite 40 years of the pill, etc – life is, in essence, cheap.

Families are cheap too where government gives all the necessary power and financial support to ending marriages, with an increasingly overburdened welfare state. Eventually society has to pick up the exponential damage of 120-150,000 divorces each year – 70% of which are brought by women against, usually financially, ‘dead-beat dads’.

Government statistic: 23% of women and 15% of men aged 16 to 59 said they had been physically assaulted by a current or former partner at some time in their lives. These figures increased to 26% and 17% respectively when frightening threats were included.

Add to that the message sent to the children of such a relationship..? Are we really getting better as individuals in the microcosm of the family? I think not.

Any wonder then that 50% of father’s lose contact with their children due to disputes, after just 2 years of separation. An expanding generation of increasingly irresponsible and violent boys with no clue how to be a father and a generation of girls who don’t trust men. (Abandonment compensation issues).

Charity begins at home, goes the popular axiom. The trouble is that we are rapidly losing any real concept of what constitutes a ‘home’ and ‘traditional family values’ – the sort that politicians bang on about all day long but do everything in their power, effectively, to undermine and devalue.

No one wants to put in the votes, work, time, money and self sacrifice to pull families back from the brink, if we haven’t already allowed them to slip irretrievably over the edge?

If societies around the world blithely or ‘benignly’ allow the family to self destruct then imploding families will eventually take the world we have known with them – like the insatiable hunger of a stellar black hole, once the chain reaction is set up it can’t be stopped until there’s nothing left of a whole galaxy. Or the ‘Butterfly Effect’, if you wish to be less dramatic..?

In fact, Evan, while I do agree with your point, I could also make the opposite one – some people behave within a close relationship in a way in which they wouldn’t dream of behaving socially…