The agenda of death and the devaluation of life marches on; apparently Europe has become a hotbed for its evil...
First and most important - I am sorry about your dog. It always hurts and never gets any easier to deal with.
I can't see your scenario happening though. Three reasons:
1 - protecting children is so ingrained in our culture that anyone who attempted this would be a bloody smear on the road. There is a reason the pro-death lot insist that a fetus is a blob of cells instead of a person.
2 - it would be economic suicide. Without them, no one is safe. To put it brutally and bluntly, they grow, work and pay for your pension. Their stupid risk taking provides a steady supply of organs for transplants, leading to longer lives over all.
3 - the most important one. All innovation is done by the young, including the ones that tend to be labelled as dysfunctional. A society that takes out the young and the curious is a dead society. It just hasn't started stinking yet.
I would hazard that these suicidal trends in American progressive thought are fully mirrored in Western European thought and therefore that the risks you point to are also underplayed and underappreciated amongst the Western European power/political elite.
Oddly - we have a counterweight. One that is somewhat unexpected, but welcome.
Eastern Europeans.
They are so solidly family oriented, it will take generations for the left to shift them. To give you one concrete example. I was walking down the street. It is about 90% rentals and about 90% Eastern European. Young kid fell over and skinned their knee while I were passing - sort of age where you have to guess the sex because it doesn't mean much. Nothing, right? By the time I had him/her out of the street there were roughly 20 people watching me. Coming up to check and look out for the kid.
First and most important - I am sorry about your dog. It always hurts and never gets any easier to deal with.
I can't see your scenario happening though. Three reasons:
1 - protecting children is so ingrained in our culture that anyone who attempted this would be a bloody smear on the road. There is a reason the pro-death lot insist that a fetus is a blob of cells instead of a person.
2 - it would be economic suicide. Without them, no one is safe. To put it brutally and bluntly, they grow, work and pay for your pension. Their stupid risk taking provides a steady supply of organs for transplants, leading to longer lives over all.
3 - the most important one. All innovation is done by the young, including the ones that tend to be labelled as dysfunctional. A society that takes out the young and the curious is a dead society. It just hasn't started stinking yet.
My point? There are a plethora of people running around these days who do not care about kids, who don't care about what happens to them. Maybe the biggest group are politicians. Think about it. If kids could vote do you think the government would treat them with the real indifference they do? I started teaching in 1972 and have seen the indifference grow. These are not the people I want making decisions of life and death about anyone I know.
Always were. Abusive and neglectful a**holes are nothing new - just read Dickens for proof. 150 years ago and you could pretty much apply his observations to right now. That neither excuses it or makes it right. I am not 100% sold on the indifference growing. I think it is more that we see it more, hear of it more and tolerate it less because it is no longer something which happens behind closed doors and is kept silent about.
To politicians, children are props and excuses, not future producers and voters.
When an educational file came in on a new resident we jokingly could tell by the pounds per square inch just how bad the abuse had been. Each year the files got larger and the students younger. I once had a 3rd grader who had memorized entire scenes from Freddie Kruger movies. Was this kid psychotic? Is a shark's butt watertight? What is released to the public and what we saw are two entirely different things. Over those years I saw the kids coming with more and more of an entitlement mentality, popping kids to get more welfare was a good plan for them, and more violent. The kids of today seem to have little plan for the future except what "might" happen to them, are largely inept socially because of all the electronic toys, and an education means little to most of them. Here I am not talking just about kids in a residential facility but kids in general. Kids who had never heard of Pearl Harbor, who the president was, what the three branches of government were, etc. I was on a trip with some other teachers one time, and I knew the teacher next to me taught at a significant university, at least part time. She was grading English papers so I asked if I could read some. I was stunned and amazed. I asked what year these kids were in and she said seniors. I said H.S. students write this poorly? Then she hit me between the eyes when she said no, they were college seniors. No, things are not getting better in these areas and core curriculum isn't going to help.
How many kids are the result of a night of pleasure or an additional 100 bucks on a welfare check? There were kids in my day and I'm 52 that parents didn't really care too much about.
I spent the last 22 years of my working life teaching children 8-21 in residential facilities for abused, neglected, and abandoned youth. They were, raped, beaten, sodomized, burned, prostituted, forced to live on the street, took drugs and alcohol, and more. They were murderers, rapists, arsonists, attachment disordered, schizophrenic, sociopathic, emotionally disturbed, and many others. Many were highly intelligent, creative, and had real potential to do good things but I would never trust them to make a good decision about someone else's life, nor would I trust their parents as their decision making was already on display in front of me.
My first year at a residential unit, 1998, I had a student who was attending the regular High School in general ed. and was headed on the college though she had been assessed in elementary school as being mentally impaired. It seems the assessor didn't see the scar tissue on her arm that kept her from fully extending her arm; her father used to punish her by pouring boiling water on her in place that could not be seen with a long sleeve shirt on. On her last day we were talking and she said, "Scott, I'm one of the lucky one's because I was found. But there are a whole lot of kids at the high schools that need to be here (at the residential facility) a lot worse than I do."
My point? There are a plethora of people running around these days who do not care about kids, who don't care about what happens to them. Maybe the biggest group are politicians. Think about it. If kids could vote do you think the government would treat them with the real indifference they do? I started teaching in 1972 and have seen the indifference grow. These are not the people I want making decisions of life and death about anyone I know. Who is to say the person who could discover a cure for cancer hasn't already been aborted or wouldn't be if 'after birth' abortions or selective euthanasia were practiced. Who is to say the next Abraham Lincoln hasn't or wouldn't receive the same fate? Thomas Edison graduated from the 2nd grade but today would be at odds with society and government, maybe even in jail. To trust the life of anyone to government bureaucrats is to destroy the country.
Sorry - pet obsession of mine.