Thursday, February 21, 2008

Demographic Winter: It's Real

It's real, that is, in Italy (and other spots in Europe)--but Italy is the center of the vortex.

Vox Day paints the picture.

You can't completely grasp the extent of Europe's post-Christian decline until you walk through the ghost towns of Italy, populated by no more a dozen elderly women and one old man sleeping in the sun. It's not something that any tourist is going to see in Florence, Venice or Rome, much less Milano, but go outside the tourist tombs and the desolation of demographic winter is impossible to miss. And the imported African hookers scattered along the truck routes in the countryside are hardly adequate compensation for what were once famously vibrant family units.

There's a large and spectacular church on the outskirts of a town near which we like to wander. Its doors are only unlocked for an hour or so every month, because despite its gorgeous interior architecture and painted ceilings, there's not only no one around to attend it, there's not even anyone left to visit it.

The USA is temporarily immune due, largely, to immigration, legal and otherwise.

2 comments:

  1. Check this out:

    http://www.demographicwinter.com/

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  2. Very true. Very true. And it's not just in the small ghost towns.

    I live in Torino, a city of over a million people. The first thing I noticed, on moving here from Milwaukee, was the absence of children. At first it was sort of pleasant for me: no ADD cases disturbing my dinner at restaurants, no babies crying in church, no toddlers bumping into me on the crowded streets.

    But after a year, I admit, it's getting creepy. Especially in church. I attend the Traditional Latin Mass, which has the youngest crowd in town on Sunday morning. But it's mostly childless straight couples and gay men: no crying babies, and no baptisms.

    I, of course, am as blameworthy as my Italian neighbors, for my lack of success in propogating the species. But how odd that even we young conservatives are not so interested in having big Catholic families!

    God bless America. At my 20 year Catholic high school reunion, we averaged four children each.

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