Letters
A response to an article in the previous issue
Dear Editor,
While I recognise some truth in your article “Beyond Political Correctness”, I must say I think you have missed part of the bigger picture. First, the time line you put on Women’s Liberation is not exactly accurate; women have been angered by their treatment for much longer than stated. However, where they once learnt to put up and shut up, now, thank God, they have found ways for their dreams to enter reality.
But I must take greater issue with your vision of men, robbed of reason for existence, ending up in prison, while women take over men’s roles. Women have not taken away men’s hope; society, especially at the poorer end, simply lacks hope altogether.
Amongst the poorer parts of our society, many young women and girls are turning to extra-marital and, worryingly often, under-age childbearing to justify their existence. At the same time, the men, lacking that option, are turning to drugs and criminal activity, thus forming the bulk of the prison population.
But the offspring of such justification, the children of teenage mothers, must grow up inside the unloving world of that desperation, often to discover that their fathers are long since locked up. So the cycle of hopelessness repeats itself.
At risk of sounding like an evangelical cure-all, the answer isn’t women returning to child-bearing of their own free will. This wouldn’t automatically give men more meaning in life. The solution is everyone looking beyond the horror of our society’s innumerable dead-ends to the one person who really can offer hope beyond any advert or career.