Os Líderes da Europa Não Têm Filhos. Não Têm Crianças em Casa.

O jornalista Phil Lawler notou um fato muito relevante entre os líderes europeus. Eles não tem filhos!!!

Vejam a lista de líderes europeus sem filhos:

- Emmanuel Macron (França);
-  Angela Merkel (Alemanha);
- Teresa May (Reino Unido);
- Paolo Gentiloni (Itália);
- Mark Rutte (Holanda);
- Stefan Löfven (Suécia);
- Xavier Bettel (Luxedmburgo);
- Nicola Sturgeon (Escócia); e
-  Jean-Claude Juncker (presidente da Comissão Europeia).

Se alguém me perguntasse a diferença na minha vida e no que eu penso da vida depois que eu tive filhos, eu nem saberia responder, pois a diferença é enorme.

Se alguém me perguntasse se o fato de eu ter filhos atrapalhou de alguma forma a minha vida profissional, eu diria que em certos aspectos sim e outros não, pois como eu sou uma pessoa muito melhor, entendo muito mais o valor da vida, isso melhora muito meu trabalho e o relacionamento com as pessoas.

Ter filhos alterou e ampliou muito a minha vida. Eu diria que entendo melhor a Deus, depois de ter filhos. Pois entendo melhor o que é se dedicar a alguém.

Para as mulheres, qual é o valor e o significado da experiência da maternidade? 

Claro que alguém pode não ter filho e ter um coração puro como o de uma criança, como Chesterton, e realizar maravilhas. Mas, em geral, o impacto dos filhos é muito profundo, é muito significativo para pensar no valor de leis e do futuro.

A falta de crianças dentro de casa certamente afeta a compreensão que os líderes da Europa têm da vida e do futuro. Certamente, eles são bem mais materialistas, de uma maneira ou de outra.

O fato desses líderes não terem tido filhos muito provavelmente significa que eles "se dedicaram à carreira" e abandonaram  ou desprezam o valor familiar, sendo assim merecem meu desprezo.

Se fossem inteligentes também saberiam que o fato de não se ter filho é péssimo para a economia. Até por uma visão puramente materialista deveriam incentivar o nascimento de crianças e dar exemplo.

A falta de filhos dos líderes europeus também é uma clara mensagem de que a Europa está morrendo culturalmente, socialmente e religiosamente. 

Como pergunta Lawler, por que se exige que um líder europeu tenha formação universitária, mas não se exige que ele tenha filhos? Ter grau universitário é mais relevante e ensina mais do que ter filhos? 

Vejamos parte do brilhante artigo de Phil Lawler, publicado no site The Catholic Culture.

Apres moi le deluge

By Phil Lawler

...

So a grossly disproportionate number of the people making decisions about Europe’s future have no direct personal stake in that future.

Is it possible for a politician rise to the top of the heap without having earned a college degree or the equivalent? It would be difficult, wouldn’t it? And shouldn’t it be? We expect our leaders to have a strong academic formation. But doesn’t the experience of raising children form character far more than a few years in school?

You may have very little in common with your next-door neighbors, still less with people on the other side of the country. But if you can all recall seeing your newborn baby for the first time, and staying up at night with a sick child, then you share some powerful bonds. You don’t share those bonds with the childless European leaders. They don’t know what your life is like.

Or then again, perhaps they do, if you are a typical resident of France or Germany or Italy or any of the other affluent countries (including the US) where the fertility rate has dipped below the replacement level. Perhaps it makes sense to choose childless leaders for an increasingly childless society. Surely it is significant that, at the same time Western societies have stopped reproducing, they have begun rolling up unsustainable public spending, piling debts onto their children—or someone else’s children.

And who are those children, who will be expected to pay off the debts and to run the old-folks’ homes? They are the children of immigrants. Maybe, if enough families from the Middle East and North Africa arrive in Europe, they can furnish the workforce that will pay off the debts and entitlements, and staff the old-folks’ homes. Macron’s victory is, it seems, a wager on that possibility: an endorsement of current European Union policies, and a repudiation of Marine Le Pen’s call for restrictions on immigration.

However, a Europe populated by the children of immigrants will be a very different society. And while it is theoretically possible for a society to accommodate and assimilate a flood of immigrants—the US did it in the early 20th century—to date Europe has not been particularly successful in absorbing the latest influx.

Christopher Caldwell, perhaps the most perceptive American commentator on the European crisis, analyzes the French failure to assimilate Muslim immigrants in an article for the City Journal, The French, Coming Apart. Caldwell reports that current French policies have promoted the interests of the elite, the “knowledge class,” while squeezing out the middle class. 

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Pierre Manent, the leading political theorist in France (if not the world) today, wrote about that reckoning in Beyond Radical Secularism. He argues that the greatest challenge facing France today is the restoration of a true political community. As he sees it, the upheavals of the 1960s were not truly political; they involved “the great withdrawal of loyalty from the community.” More and more, people came to see themselves as autonomous individuals, motivated by various impulses and desires, rather than as participants in a common endeavor. “The citizen of action was followed by the individual of enjoyment.”

“We are probably the first, and we will surely remain the only, people in history to give over all elements of social life and all contents of human life to the unlimited sovereignty of the individual,” Manent writes. Political leaders gain influence today by promising to expand the realm of individual autonomy indefinitely, to invent new “freedoms” that must be protected, to promote new forms of self-expression and self-satisfaction, to make “diversity” a primary goal. Now, with the rise of Islamic immigration, France faces the ultimate test of its own new political ideals: the growing strength of a minority that rejects diversity, rejects the supremacy of the individual, and therefore rejects the very ideology that allowed the minority to grow.

The only solution, Manent argues, is for France to insist that Muslims accept a role as French citizens, as participants in a common enterprise. But that cannot be if native French citizens do not first acknowledge their role as citizens rather than autonomous individuals.

What is the difference between citizens and individuals? Citizens recognize their duties along with their rights. Small children will always behave as individuals. In a healthy society their parents behave as citizens—because there is no better way to train people in the habits of accepting responsibility than giving them the care of their own children.