Peggy Noonan's Love Potion

Peggy Noonan’s prescription of love for the depraved London rioters (Wall Street Journal, After the London Riots, August 13^th) may sound to secularists as too close to the Christian message to love thy neighbor as we love ourselves, especially the poor and the poor in spirit (as these young insurgents so obviously are).  Even those more devout might scorn her less-than-novel “cure” as weak-kneed and as impotent as the social welfare advocates defending the urchins.   

Though Ms. Noonan hesitates to proselytize, the lack of other good refuges in the face of fear and uncertainty has often led wise and curious men back to God.  Really, what else is there? The bureaucracies and promulgations of the UN? The ignorant, albeit often well-intended, machinations of men making plans for other men’s lives?

What the UK (and the USA) could use right now is a modern-day C.S. Lewis reading out loud to the nation (as he did to a besieged Britain in 1942-44), reminding us that the strength and courage to confront terror in the streets and timidity in our hearts are close at hand, if only we open (or re-open) our minds to the possibility that God can help us.

And really, how can the nation with the highest abortion rate in Europe pretend to be interested in the welfare of its children?  Countries like ours and the UK, where adults can take fertility drugs to achieve pregnancy late in their child-bearing years and then abort one or more of the multiple babies conceived (too much work for an older mother), where less-than-perfect (in human eyes) Down’s syndrome babies are swiftly aborted--cultures where abortion is acceptable and spanking is not—might consider the possibility that even the stupidest of our offspring may have picked up the idea that they, not the Church or God or their parents, ought to be the arbiters of their own moral fitness.