by Carla O'HaraThe traditional family unit, now considered cliched is 2.1 children, a house (with over-inflated mortgage), quarter acre block, a dog, a cat, and everything else that encompassed ‘keeping up with the Jones’s’. This passe stereotype has forced the celebrity class to distinguish themselves and their wealth from the rest of us.
Celebrities indulge in drug abuse, sexual debauchery, cosmetic surgery and lavish, outlandish lifestyles, which, for the most part, is unusual and abnormal. In recent times, the celebrity class has gone one step further and sought another way to distinguish themselves; in addition to having biological children, they adopt children from the third world.
Celebrities guilty of this vice include Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Meg Ryan, Joely Fisher, Ewan McGregor and James Caviezel. U.S. pop star Madonna was allowed to adopt a second child from Malawi on Friday June 12, 2009 after the country’s Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling in a case that has been criticised by local rights groups.Superficially, they are adopting for reasons of philanthropy and altruism; in reality it is a way to justify child poaching. As a way of distinguishing themselves for the rest of society, they have themselves a new kind of pet - the third world child.
Perhaps I am being unfair to compare adopting of a third world child to the buying of a pet. However, the question should be asked, how could a person of high moral character go to an orphanage of a poor country, ask the children to be paraded and then “pick” the lucky one? The concept is reminiscent of a pet store, with puppies and kittens in the window. It has a lot to do with the Politically Correct idea that ’sacrificing’ your own children to help more disadvantaged children is considered a virtue. Celebrities are financially far more capable of doing this (as adoption is costly). By adopting third world children, they can get positive PR by being at the cutting edge and by being seen to be leading a ‘progressive’ new phenomenon.These celebrities adopt from the third world, not to help the third world, nor to help children. Otherwise, why then do they not adopt or even consider fostering children of their home country?
Once adopted, these “child-pets” have their own nanny to take care of them in their day to day activities. Every now and then, the celebrity pulls out their “child-pet” to perform for media cameras. As Sarah Silverman (a supposed “politically incorrect” Jewish comedian) once said;
“I think if you adopt, you really have to go brown with it because otherwise you don’t get the credit.”
Perhaps it is more accurate to compare these third world adoptees not as pets, but to slaves brought to the West by the African slave trade. During the 16th century, buying people from overseas was effectively as simple as it is today. Only this time, we allow our purchases to sit at the table and eat a meal with us and our biological children.There also seems to be little discussion of how those in the third world consider the adoption of their children and use of them as tokens by celebrities. Liberals would be distraught to hear the following comments by Somalian blogger Bashir Goth in a 2006 post regarding his failed adoption as a child by an American nurse.
"I cannot but admire my father’s wisdom in following his parental inclination of no other love or material comfort ever equalling that of a father looking at his own child growing before his eyes and passing down to him his people’s culture and history. I wonder if my culture and my village would have a home in my heart if I were raised abroad.”
He confirms the importance of parents bringing up their own children within the context of their people and associated culture and history.
Voltaire said “It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere“, it is doubtful that the adoptees themselves realise that they are in shackles. Are they free to return to their home? Are they free to live with their own people, with their own culture? What will be the effect on the psyche of the child when they find out they were taken half way around the world from their true identity so their adopted parents could appear more PC and trendy? Alienated and used, like a commodity along with the perfumes and clothing that grace the magazines their celebrity parents appear on the front covers of.
What would be the effect on their psyche when they read their mother, Angelina Jolie’s comments on her biological birth?
“I love it. It makes me feel like a woman. It makes me feel that all the things about my body are suddenly there for a reason.”
And compare such words with those of Sarah Silverman’s about only getting credit if they are brown. Angelina Jolie is renowned for the diversity of her adopted brood. She says that each child is taught their biological language. Angelina’s adoptees, who learn their biological language amongst a foreign land and culture, cannot be compared to children able to live amongst their own people and culture. For Jolie to suggest that money can provide the adoptee with a better economic future, without realising it, she has actually placed a value judgement on the culture and people of her third world adoptee. Such behaviour pushes Western and Imperialist ideals onto non Westerners, whilst simultaneously suggesting that other non Western value systems are not valid or worthy. It is supremacist in its very nature, as it parallels historic assimilation of the heathen peoples of Africa, and a return to the psyche of White man’s burden.
The white man’s burden is responsible for the alleged kidnapping of over 100,000 Aboriginal children from their parents who were then subsequently placed in religious institutions. La Trobe University’s prominent Jewish Professor Robert Manne declares:
“It was not from harm that the mixed-descent children were rescued, but from their Aboriginality”.
Professor Manne is more apt in his description than he realises. Whether or not the Aboriginal Stolen generation suffered harm at the hands of their own people is largely irrelevant, what is poignant are the long term psychological impacts to those children raised by White Australians. In our efforts to help, to educate, and provide a better future for Aboriginal children, we are now suffering the burden of an invasive protective policy. In February of 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd apologised to the Australian Aborigines:
“especially for the removal of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children from their families, their communities and their country.”
Yet, in November of 2008 it was revealed that one in six Aboriginal children in NSW was in the care of the State, a total of 4000 Aboriginal children, compared to 1000 in 1969.
The true cost of assimilation of third world adoption and the removal of Aboriginal children from care has and continues to be the White man’s burden, in essence, an absence of nobility for all involved. If we really care for ourselves and for the third world and the indigenous populations, we should simply for good and for bad, let them be.
