"Is liberal Catholicism dead?" asks David van Biema in Time magazine. It's a pretty good essay, actually. And the answer, it seems, is yes, pretty much. Excerpt:

But the familiar progressives-versus-Vatican paradigm seems almost certain to be undone by a looming demographic tsunami. Almost everyone agrees that the "millennial generation," born in 1980 or later, while sharing liberal views on many issues, has no desire to mount the barricades. Notes [liberal Jesuit Father Tom] Reese, "Younger Catholics don't argue with the bishops; they simply do what they want or shop for another church." And Hispanic Catholics, who may be the U.S. majority by 2020, don't see this as their battle. "I'm sure they're happy that the celebration of the Eucharist is in the vernacular," says Tilley, "but they don't have significant issues connected to Vatican II."

And so, unless Benedict contradicts in Rome what he said in New York, the Church may have reached a tipping point. This is not to say that the (overhyped) young Catholic Right will swing into lay dominance. Nor will liberal single-issue groups simply evaporate. But if they cohere again, it will be around different defining issues.

This is actually food for a more interesting discussion than the usual left-right, orthodox-liberal shoutfests. Diogenes at Catholic World Report makes the critical point that even if the liberal Catholic project is moribund, the liberal establishment can drag out the expiration by controlling the institutions (chanceries, rectories, departments of theology). But I think Fr. Reese makes a pretty devastating point by saying that the young don't even see the point in arguing with the bishops. The implication is that younger Catholics don't consider the matter of authority worth arguing about, because as a practical matter, they don't recognize it.

The old progressives-vs.-conservatives battle of the post-conciliar soixante-huitards is ceasing to matter, not because the orthodox have won the day -- would that it were so! -- but because they marched through the institutions and created a new generation that neither knows the substance of its faith, nor considers that important. In all sincerity, I don't really understand the complaint of the Catholic left: true, they don't have women priests, but otherwise, Moralistic Therapeutic Deism has largely won the field. Again, from my point of view that's a tragedy, but there it is. The outward form still exists, but the inner life?

This is going to take at least a couple of generations to sort out, but I would suggest the example of Europe as indicative of where US Catholicism might be heading. Those Catholics who have held on to the faith across generations are the traditionalists and otherwise orthodox who have not accomodated themselves to the culture. Van Biema, I think, makes a mistake in calling liberal Catholicism "dead" because its passions aren't shared by the younger generation. This reminds me of the mistake a lot of pepole make about Barack Obama, thinking of him as a post-Boomer figure capable of putting the obsessions of the 1960s behind us. He is, but only superficially: he has absorbed the core beliefs of the Sixties generation, and expresses them without agonizing over them.

What think ye?

Inspired by the college hoax/cognitive elite thread here, Maximos unearthed an older piece of his on the theme of the crisis of political legitimacy coming as a result of the natural population-sorting by cognitive ability, "in which the downward mobility of the below-average, average, and even many of the above-average would collide with fabulist visions of universal upward mobility in the New Economy." Excerpt:

As regards the new economy of services, high finance, and god-king CEOs, highly remunerative compensation ultimately correlates with cognitive ability - this was the primary thesis of The Bell Curve, for those who remember - and this fact, operating in tandem with deindustrialization and globalization, both increases the rewards accruing to the cognitive elite and decreases returns to the average, who increasingly find themselves in competition with the average masses of nations at much lower levels of economic development. Education can do nothing to alter this reality, inasmuch as cognitive ability is only marginally malleable under environmental influences, if at all. An emphasis upon educational reform in this connection could actually have perverse effects, such as the devaluation of credentials, leading to market demands for ever more credentialization as a condition of employment, and the erection of additional financial barriers to economic advancement, as the demand for higher education drives up the cost, relentlessly. (Snip)

In the end, the circle cannot be squared, and the dilemmas of globalization still hold. Structural factors dictate the exacerbation of the new inequality, with all that this entails, and this because those structural factors have essentially marketized heritable qualities not amenable to amelioration; simultaneously, those structural factors have developed concurrently with an increasing pursuit of efficiency through arbitrage and labour substitution.

And:

[T]he contradictions are sharpening, as the gulf between our romantic/gnostic notions of intelligence, aptitude, and educability, and the pitiless realities of IQ and economic opportunity, opens out upon a fathomless abyss. Such contradictions are always resolved; the only questions concern the timing and the means.

Shorter Maximos: Our economy is by its very structure stacked in favor of the cognitive elite, and life is going to get harder and harder for those who did not inherit the most favorable genes, until they get fed up with it and rise up.

This came to mind last night when I finally got around to watching the DVD of "Demographic Winter." It's well worth buying and watching and sharing, but I hope the producers dial back on the doomy music in the sequel, and let the sociologists and demographers present facts and data, which are sufficient to make their case. Anyway, toward the end of the film the Nobel laureate economist Gary Becker and others are talking about the connection between family structure and the ability to thrive in a modern economy. Social science data overwhelmingly demonstrate that on average, children who are raised in a stable two-parent household have tremendous advantages in learning over children born out of wedlock (40 percent of all US births today), or raised by a single parent. In a meritocratic economy, these children will tend to rise to cognitive elite status.

And the elite will not reproduce themselves, if current trends hold. Here's University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus, from the film:

This is where it gets weird, though. Who's reproducing? This is where you have a demographic, economic paradox. Those who can best maintain a large family are not having those families. And those who can least sustain large families tend to have more children.

The University of Chicago's Robert Michael says in the film that in our modern economy, "Over time, the range of disadvantage is growing." How will it resolve itself? No one says.

There's a fascinating aspect to all this that I hadn't considered, but which is taken up in the film's last segment. Regnerus says:

The evolutionary biology of sex is all about reproducing. If we're hard-wired to reproduce, why are so many people not reproducing? ... The most intelligent people in the world are not interested in reproducing.

Philip Longman, the secular liberal demographer (who looks worried to death in the film), adds:

Darwinism assumes that organisms always breed up to the limits of their resources, and this is what causes the competition, the survival of the fittest under the theory. And yet, here we look and see there's one species that stands in exception to that.

Two years ago, Longman wrote a very controversial essay in Foreign Policy, arguing from a secular materialist perspective that evolution favors patriarchy. Understand, as a secular liberal he admits that he finds this objectionable -- but he doesn't see that the data point to any other conclusion:

Advanced societies are growing more patriarchal, whether they like it or not. In addition to the greater fertility of conservative segments of society, the rollback of the welfare state forced by population aging and decline will give these elements an additional survival advantage, and therefore spur even higher fertility. As governments hand back functions they once appropriated from the family, notably support in old age, people will find that they need more children to insure their golden years, and they will seek to bind their children to them through inculcating traditional religious values akin to the Bible's injunction to honor thy mother and father.

Societies that are today the most secular and the most generous with their underfunded welfare states will be the most prone to religious revivals and a rebirth of the patriarchal family. The absolute population of Europe and Japan may fall dramatically, but the remaining population will, by a process similar to survival of the fittest, be adapted to a new environment in which no one can rely on government to replace the family, and in which a patriarchal God commands family members to suppress their individualism and submit to father.

In "Demographic Winter," he notes that the only people reproducing at and beyond replacement level are religious conservatives and fundamentalists. He says:

Certain kinds of human beings are on the road to extinction -- people who, for lack of faith, don't go forth and multiply.

How are we in the US going to resolve paradox Regnerus identifies in a way that allows us to keep our modern meritocratic economy? That may well be the most important political question of this century.

"Evil lust and evil passions are to a great extent generated by boredome and emptiness. It is difficult to struggle against that bordeom by means of abstract goodness and virtue. The dreadful thing is that virtue at times seems deadly dull, and there's no salvation in it. Cold, hard-set virtue, devoid of creative fire, is always dull and never saves. The heart must be set aglow if dullness is to be dispelled.

...Lust is a means of escaped from boredom when goodness provides no such escape. This is why it is very difficult -- almost impossible -- to conquer evil passions through negative asceticism ... and prohibition. They can only be conquered positively, through awakening the positive and creative spiritual force opposed to them.

...Purely negative asceticism, preoccupied with evil and sinful desires and strivings, so far from enlightening the soul, intensifies its darkness. We must preach, therefore, a morality based not upon the annihilation of will but upon its enlightenment, not upon the humiliation of man and his external submission to God, but upon the creative realization by man of the divine in life -- of the values of truth, goodness and beauty."

-- Nicholas Berdyaev, from "Ultimate Questions: An Anthology of Modern Russian Religious Thought" (ed. Fr. Alexander Schmemann)

This is why I think the lives of the saints are so important to us, as well as true art -- this, as distinct from moral exhortation and abstract reasoning (which, don't get me wrong, have their place). We need to see what it is like to live out the truth of our faith as a source of true life. T.S. Eliot remarked once that "If we learn to read poetry properly, the poet never persuades us to believe anything. ...What we learn from Dante, or the Bhagavad-Gita, or any other religious poetry is what it feels like to believe that religion." If you've ever met a saintly person, and many of us have, you know what it's like to be powerfully attracted to the light shining forth from him.

The reason I bring any of this up now is that I can't stop thinking about that Lindsay Palmer, the four-year-old who saved herself and her baby sister from the murderers who beat her mother to death, and slashed her little brother's throat, and then hers. She was four, so presumably she was acting only on instinct, not as the fruit of moral deliberation. Still, though, at that age, all she knew was that she loved her sister, and she was going to take care of her. That if they were going to live, it was going to be up to her to be brave, and to endure.

I spoke today to someone at the East Baton Rouge Parish sheriff's office about the case. She told me that they have a deputy who debriefed the child in the hospital. The woman deputy spent the night with Lindsay in the hospital room after surgery to repair the damage to her neck. The spokeswoman told me the deputy held Lindsay all night to calm her, and that Lindsay wouldn't go to sleep until nurses brought her sister, the little baby she carried out of the woods to safety, to her to cradle.

I can't get that child's deeds off my mind, and you know, I'm grateful for that. Demons were in the woods that afternoon, but so were the angels. What a powerful sign of hope is it to us to contemplate the courage and resilience of that child! I wish I were more like her, obeying the humane instinct to comfort the suffering and carry them to the light in the clearing instead of being too often mesmerized in the forest's shadows by grief and despair.

As a follow to that great thread about college and culture, let me direct your attention to a provocative piece from the NYT Magazine yesterday, in which political scientists Bill Galston and Pietro Nevola argue that the whole "Red America/Blue America" idea is rooted in geographical reality. Excerpt:

The buzz these days is that American politics may be entering a “postpartisan” era, as a new generation finds the old ideological quarrels among baby boomers to be increasingly irrelevant. In reality, matters are not so simple. Far from being postpartisan, today’s young adults are significantly more likely to identify as Democrats than were their predecessors. Along with colleagues at the Brookings and Hoover institutions, we recently completed a comprehensive study of the nation’s polarization. Our research concludes not only that the ideological differences between the political parties are growing but also that they have become embedded in American society itself.

More:

What accounts for the decline of ideologically mixed localities? Bill Bishop, a journalist, and Robert Cushing, a sociologist, who have studied this issue, stress that the age of “white flight” to the suburbs is over. Instead, during the past two decades, many whites have moved to one group of cities and many blacks to another. Meanwhile, young people have deserted rural and older manufacturing areas for cities like Austin and Portland. Places with higher densities of college graduates attract even more, so that the gap between such communities and less-educated areas widens further. Zones of high education, in turn, produce more innovation and enjoy higher incomes, generating communities dominated by upper-middle-class tastes. Lower-educated regions, by contrast, tend to be more family-oriented and more faithful to traditional authority.

Not surprisingly, this demographic sorting correlates with a widening difference in political preferences. What’s more, according to Bishop and Cushing, once a tipping point is reached, majorities tend to become supermajorities.

Latino immigration skews this dynamic. Dallas County, where I live, is now blue, thanks in large part to the influx of Latinos, who vote Democratic but who do not fit the culturally-blue profile. Within my lifetime, Texas will likely tip from red to blue because of the size of the Latino population.

Anyway, what Galston and Nivola point to is the political division of Americans according to cognitive ability. What this could imply is that the Republican Party will of necessity become what Ross and Reihan, in their forthcoming book, call the Party of Sam's Club. From their much-discussed 2005 essay:

This is the Republican party of today--an increasingly working-class party, dependent for its power on supermajorities of the white working class vote, and a party whose constituents are surprisingly comfortable with bad-but-popular liberal ideas like raising the minimum wage, expanding clumsy environmental regulations, or hiking taxes on the wealthy to fund a health care entitlement. To borrow a phrase from Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, Republicans are now "the party of Sam's Club, not just the country club."

Therein lies a great political danger for Republicans, because on domestic policy, the party isn't just out of touch with the country as a whole, it's out of touch with its own base. ... The current Republican majority isn't likely to be defeated, or disappear, in the next few election cycles --though serious setbacks are always possible. [Remember, this was written in 2005 -- RD] But the party feels increasingly tired and corrupted by power, obsessed with fighting yesterday's battles and unwilling to adapt to the changing political landscape--a landscape that has changed, in many cases, precisely because of the party's past successes. Because of the GOP, most Americans no longer feel overtaxed; because of the GOP, rising crime rates no longer threaten the fabric of daily life; because of the GOP, the free market no longer buckles under the weight of government regulation. But in these very successes lie the seeds of potential defeat.

Many of the issues that the Republican party rode to power remain salient today, of course. The GOP doesn't need to rethink its support for a strong national defense, for instance, or its commitment to social conservatism. But having risen to power at a time when most Americans were worried about losing their economic freedom, the party needs to adapt to a new reality--namely, that today, Americans are increasingly worried about their economic security--and reorient its agenda to address those concerns.

So, the Republican Party is either going to have to go the way of its social-conservative base, and become fully the party of working-class and middle-income Americans (for the present, mostly white). Or the Democrats are going to have to stiff its social liberals and become more fully a party that can legitimately accomodate social and religious conservatives. Which do you think is more likely? I say whatever the fate of Gov. Huckabee in tomorrow's Republican Party, the Huckification of the GOP is, I think, inevitable. Good.

But the question of the health of a meritocratic democracy in which political parties are divided between the cognitive haves and have-nots remains.

In the new TAC, Allan Carlson ponders what George Bailey of "It's A Wonderful Life" would do to resolve the home mortgage crisis. Excerpt:

First of all, I think he would want to examine the sociology of the crisis. How many of the imperiled homebuyers are actually young families with children? These he would want to help. How many are singletons who used this speculative opportunity to jump onto the housing escalator? How many are empty-nesters who rode the bubble to move into a McMansion? How many are would-be investors looking for quick turnarounds in a rising market? There would be little sympathy for these latter cases, I suspect.

To help threatened families with children, George Bailey would support private and public efforts that put them first in line for access to renegotiated and publicly guaranteed mortgages. “Households with dependent children” would serve as the defining criterion. He would also probably agree with guidelines recently offered by the Heritage Foundation, including:
All government-assisted refinancing should go only to homeowners who use that home as their primary residence.

No help should be given to investors, speculators, owners of vacation homes, homebuilders, realtors, mortgage brokers, or bankers.

Help should also be denied to anyone who lied or made misrepresentations on their original mortgage applications.

Read the whole thing.

Andrew Sullivan thinks so:

If there were ever a moment when the international community, led as it must be, by the U.S. and the U.N., should use force to prevent what now looks like mass murder, this is it.

Three words: Black Hawk Down.

The 1992 US invasion of Somalia came off with the approval and ultimately the participation of the United Nations, and was undertaken solely for humanitarian reasons. We wanted to feed the people who were being starved as a result of civil war. Everyone remembers, or should, how the Somali warlord Aideed dragged our troops into the war. Nearly 50 Americans were killed before the US and the UN withdrew.

If we went into Burma, we wouldn't be able to do it with UN backing; Russia and China, which covet Burma's offshore oil reserves, will not let that happen. Furthermore, any humanitarian invasion force will have to face not irregular jackasses with AK-47s, but an army that has nearly half a million men under arms, and boasts modern Chinese-made jet fighters. There would be a very real risk of shooting war. Are we prepared to have our cargo planes blown out of the sky by the Burmese? Are we prepared to provoke that paranoid regime into arresting or killing all foreign aid workers?

Sometimes, as painful as it is, you have no real choice but to say, "Don't just do something -- stand there!"

I slogged through the NYT's long, long, looooong front-pager yesterday about Obama's rise through Chicago politics, and I found these passages remarkable:

Others see his deft movements as a politician’s shifting of positions and alliances for strategic advantage, leaving some disappointed and baffled about where he really stands.

“He has a pattern of forming relationships with various communities and as he takes his next step up, kind of distancing himself from them and then positioning himself as the bridge,” said Ali Abunimah, a Palestinian-American author and co-founder of the online publication Electronic Intifada, who became acquainted with Mr. Obama in Chicago.

[snip]

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama hewed closely to liberal orthodoxy, positions that have become controversial in the presidential race. A candidate questionnaire from one liberal group, for instance, detailed his views on hot-button issues like the death penalty (opposed) and a ban on handguns (in favor).

Today, Mr. Obama espouses more centrist views and says a campaign aide had incorrectly characterized his views on those issues — a shift that does not sit well with some in the group, the Independent Voters of Illinois Independent Precinct Organization.

“We certainly thought those were his positions,” said David Igasaki, the group’s chairman, who noted Mr. Obama had also interviewed with the group. “We understand that people change their views. But it sort of bothers me that he doesn’t acknowledge that. He tries to say that was never his view.”

[snip]

For years, the Obamas had been regular dinner guests at the Hyde Park home of Rashid Khalidi, a Middle East scholar at the University of Chicago and an adviser to the Palestinian delegation to the 1990s peace talks. Mr. Khalidi said the talk would often turn to the Middle East, and he talked with Mr. Obama about issues like living conditions in the occupied territories. In 2000, the Khalidis held a fund-raiser for Mr. Obama during his Congressional campaign. Both Mr. Khalidi and Mr. Abunimah, of the Electronic Intifada, said Mr. Obama had spoken at the fund-raiser and had called for the United States to adopt a more “evenhanded approach” to the Palestinian-Israel conflict.

Still, Mr. Khalidi said ascertaining Mr. Obama’s precise position was often difficult. “You may come away thinking, ‘Wow, he agrees with me,’ ” he said. “But later, when you get home and think about it, you are not sure.”

A.J. Wolf, a Hyde Park rabbi who is a friend of Mr. Obama’s and has often invited Mr. Khalidi to speak at his synagogue, said Mr. Obama had disappointed him by not being more assertive about the need for both Israel and the Palestinians to move toward peace. “He’s played all those notes right for the Israel lobby,” said Mr. Wolf, who is sometimes critical of Israel.

During the Senate campaign, Mr. Obama joined in a “Walk for Israel” rally along Lake Michigan on Israel Solidarity Day. The Crowns and other Jewish leaders raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for him. Several days before the primary in 2004, some of his Jewish supporters took offense that Mr. Obama had not taken the opportunity on a campaign questionnaire to denounce Yasir Arafat, the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, or to strongly support Israel’s building of a security fence.

But in a sign of how far Mr. Obama had come in his coalition-building, friends from the American Israel Political Action Committee, the national pro-Israel lobbying group, helped him rush out a response to smooth over the flap.

In an e-mail message, Mr. Obama blamed a staff member for the oversight, and expressed the hope that “none of this has raised any questions on your part regarding my fundamental commitment to Israel’s security.” Mr. Abunimah has written of running into the candidate around that time and has said that Mr. Obama told him: “I’m sorry I haven’t said more about Palestine right now, but we are in a tough primary race. I’m hoping that when things calm down I can be more upfront.”

The Obama camp has denied Mr. Abunimah’s account. Mr. Khalidi, who is now the director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, said, “I’m unhappy about the positions he’s taken, but I can’t say I’m terribly disappointed.” He added: “People think he’s a saint. He’s not. He’s a politician.”

Now, where have you heard before about a masterful Democratic politician who has the ability to leave people convinced that he agrees with them, only to take a different stand later, when it's in his political interest to do so? That's right: our old friend Slick Willie. Personally, I'm glad Obama moved rightward on the Israel question, but I think we'd all do well to reflect on Rashid Khalidi's counsel here, and ratchet down expectations.

We may not be looking at the Audacity of Hope as much as we are looking at the Audacity of Hope, Arkansas.

(Speaking of which, here's my newspaper column from Sunday, in which I note that the promise that Obama would deliver us all from the Sturm und Drang of the Baby Boom generation is evaporating as we learn more about how he's absorbed their political views, and repackaged them in a stylistically less confrontational way.)

Ruth Gledhill, the religion writer for the Times of London, says "it feels like the soul of Britain is dying." What's she talking about? A new report projecting further astonishing collapse in British Christianity. An excerpt from Gledhill's article:

Church attendance in Britain is declining so fast that the number of regular churchgoers will be fewer than those attending mosques within a generation, research published today suggests.

The fall - from the four million people who attend church at least once a month today - means that the Church of England, Catholicism and other denominations will become financially unviable. A lack of funds from the collection plate to support the Christian infrastructure, including church upkeep and ministers’ pay and pensions, will force church closures as ageing congregations die.

In contrast, the number of actively religious Muslims will have increased from about one million today to 1.96 million in 2035.

According to Religious Trends, a comprehensive statistical analysis of religious practice in Britain, published by Christian Research, even Hindus will come close to outnumbering churchgoers within a generation. The forecast to 2050 shows churchgoing in Britain declining to 899,000 while the active Hindu population, now at nearly 400,000, will have more than doubled to 855,000. By 2050 there will be 2,660,000 active Muslims in Britain - nearly three times the number of Sunday churchgoers.

[snip]

By 2050 there will be just 3,600 churchgoing Methodists left in Britain, Christian Research predicts. Anglicans will be down to 87,800, Catholics to 101,700, Presbyterians to 4,400, Baptists to 123,000 and independents to 168,000.

[snip]

The report predicts that by 2030, when Dr Rowan Williams’s successor as Archbishop of Cantebury will be approaching retirement, there could be just 350,000 people attending just 10,000 Anglican churches, with an average of 35 worshippers each. The next Archbishop after that could find his position “totally nonviable”, the report says, with just 180,000 worshippers in 6,000 churches by 2040.

Gledhill offered this separate commentary on the Religious Trends findings:

The crisis facing Britain’s Christian churches is linked directly to the crisis of British identity now being addressed by the Government.

Oaths of allegiance and citizenship ceremonies are under consideration. But one thing lacking from so many conversations about “Britishness” is any reference to a link between religious and ethnic identity.

In contrast to the decline of Christianity in Britain, Islam and Hinduism are thriving here. One reason is that for Muslims and Hindus, wherever they come from, their religion is inextricably linked with their sense of identity.

Even though the last Prime Minister was devout and converted to Roman Catholicism soon after he left office, and the present one is a son of the manse, the Government remains strongly secular. This is an inevitable result of the liberalising trends of the last century, and one not necessarily to be lamented.

But the consequences, good and bad, need to be faced.

A viable culture without a viable cult? Good luck with that.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be flippant. I believe this is an utter catastrophe, for reasons that go far beyond caring about the fate of individual souls. The nation and the culture that gave the world so much Christian art, Christian philosophy, Christian prayer and above all, Christian witness in word and deed, is dying. People will still live in the British Isles, obviously, but they won't be the people of the Book. They will be some other people. And our children and their children's children will all be much poorer for it.

I spoke with my sister this evening. She was pretty down. A young woman she had taught in sixth grade was murdered the other day. The woman's estranged boyfriend (she was separated from her husband) and a female relative of the victim allegedly lured her and her three young children to the woods outside a park. They are charged with beating Jessica Johnson Palmer to death with a baseball bat, slitting the throats of her seven year old son Juan and four year old daughter Lindsay, and leaving Johnson Palmer's seven month old baby girl Robbyn in the woods to die.

The next day, a groundskeeper was mowing grass in the park, and saw four year old Lindsay staggering out of the woods, holding her baby sister. She ran towards the lawnmowers, then collapsed. But she and Robbyn survived. Little Lindsay was able to tell police everything she had seen, and they arrested the two alleged murderers. Details in this report from the funeral yesterday. Excerpt:

Clutching her Bible, Elaine Johnson strode up to the pulpit at the end of her daughter and grandson’s joint funeral services Saturday and declared that she forgives the pair accused of killing them.

“I love them. I cannot hate them,” Johnson said of the accused, her cousin, Trendall Lashel Matthews, 22, and Dominique Dantoni Smith, 28. “God says to love.”

[snip]

Relatives wanting to hold tiny Lindsay in their arms passed her back and forth during the three-hour service. She had a white scarf around her neck to conceal her wound.

Juan Palmer Sr. carried his 7-month-old daughter, Robbyn, her arms marked with bug bites from her night in the woods, into the church Saturday morning.

That child apparently saw her own mother beaten to death, survived a throat-slashing, spent the night in the woods sheltering a baby, then carried that baby to safety.

Four years old.

There are no words.

UPDATE: It turns out the man charged with these murders (along with a female companion) is the father of Lindsay and Juan. Which, if the charges prove true, would mean he either cut his own children's throats, or watched passively as the woman did it.

So does Thomas Friedman, who lost his mother this past year, and who ends his Mother's Day column like this:

Whenever I’ve had the honor of giving a college graduation speech, I always try to end it with this story about the legendary University of Alabama football coach, Bear Bryant. Late in his career, after his mother had died, South Central Bell Telephone Company asked Bear Bryant to do a TV commercial. As best I can piece together, the commercial was supposed to be very simple — just a little music and Coach Bryant saying in his tough voice: “Have you called your mama today?”

On the day of the filming, though, he decided to ad-lib something. He reportedly looked into the camera and said: “Have you called your mama today? I sure wish I could call mine.” That was how the commercial ran, and it got a huge response from audiences.

So on this Mother’s Day, if you take one thing away from this column, take this: Call your mother.

I sure wish I could call mine.