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Letters

Youth Suicide .

THE tragedy of Truk (PIM Feb) is symptomatic of a sickness around the world.AlymToffler described it as Future Shock; Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as strikes in the noosphere” refusal to use our brains.

As Teilhard said, you can offer mankind the most magnificent future. But if it is known beforehand that all will

then disintegrate, people will simply

“down tools”. Human beings will never consent to labour like Sisyphys, eternally pushing rocks up hills (The Vision of the Past, p. 231).

That feeling has to be most acute amongst the youth of the world as they start to grasp the size of the work to be done. There’s a whole world to be recreated.

“Is the game worth the candle,”

Teilhard asked, “or are we simply its dupes? Last century witnessed the first systematic strikes in industry. The next will surely not pass without the threat of strikes in the noosphere” (The Phenomenon of Man, p. 253).

We rightly concern ourselves about holes in the ozone layer and irreparable damage to the biosphere. But even more fragile in the noosphere of the

world’s reflective grey matter; our brains linked together by global net works of communications media.

Given scope to develop and use their brains, young people stand poised upon the threshold of the future, like fledglings about to try their wings in the vastness of outer space. Grandsons of Afghan camel-drivers have already orbited the earth in Russian spacecraft.

But young persons given no scope even for nation-building have only two choices. As Pope John Paul II said,

they feel impelled to migrate physically

to a better world; or psychologically into oblivion (S ollicitudo Rei Socialis).

Considering all the research by Fr F.

X. Bezel and others, there are no glib answers to the worst tragedy of modern life: adolescent suicides.

But surely part of the answer is to be found in the Pope’s address To the Youth of The World in 1987, remind ing them of the jewel that is to be found at the core of each young per son’s being: the irreplaceable treasure of their own selves.

All creation attended their birth, for they carried within them the hopes of the everlasting hills. They are indeed creation’s crowning glory. For the re flective competence of their brains is

unmatched throughout the known and knowable universe.

Using their share of the world’s grey matter, they have the capacity to gain reflective in sight into the depths of everything; even the depths of God (1 Cor 2:10)!

G. R. Fallon

Suva •

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WE failed to credit Larry Morgan, of the United States Department of Interior, for the photograph on page 8 of the February issue. The photo was one of the illustrations used in the Truk suicide cover story.

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