The state vs. Alfie Evans’ parents
Like Charlie Gard before him, British toddler Alfie Evan’s situation highlights not just questions of medical ethics, but the power of the state over the individual.
I wrote about Charlie here. Alfie Evans’ situation differs in some details, but it’s essentially similar.
It used to be that the state would intervene when parents (or other private citizens) wanted to treat their children (or other relatives) in ways that didn’t measure up to a standard of care. For example, there were people whose religion forbade blood transfusions, and sometimes the will of the parents about that was overridden in order to save a child’s life. But the emphasis was nearly always on the state’s interest in treating and saving rather than letting die.
This time (and in the case of Charlie Gard) the state is intervening to stop parents from treating, or from preserving a life the state has decided contains too much suffering, although there’s no indication that Alfie Evans is especially conscious of much of anything.
One would say the case is about money in a country in which the state is in charge of health care, except that here there are other resources that have been offered to the parents. Italy has offered to take him, the Pope has lent support, and yet the parents have been forbidden by the British court to leave the country.
This is a reminder that the liberty tradition across the pond is not as strong as it is here. And yet what happens “over there” often wends its way over here, and there have been hints of that in cases such as that of Jahi McMath. As I wrote here:
A better analogy to the Charlie Gard case [and that of Evans] is that of Jahi McMath, involving a minor child and a dispute between Jahi’s family and her hospital and doctors over the definition of brain death and when life support should end. However, the McMath case was settled by an agreement between the child’s family and the hospital in which the family was allowed to take her from the hospital and continue life support.
If the Charlie Gard case had occurred in the US, however, the legal emphasis differs. In the UK, disputes between parents and doctors are brought to court under an objective best interests of the child standard. But in the United States, in similar cases the best interests “tend to be resolved in favor of parental rights,” according to Dr. John D. Lantos, director of Bioethics Center at Children’s Mercy Kansas City. And, when courts do overrule parents’ wishes in the US, they usually do so to order care over parental objections rather than the opposite.
The different legal standard in the UK was further described by Claire Fenton-Glynn, legal scholar at the University of Cambridge:
“English law”¦does not see parents as having the ”˜right’ to make decisions on behalf of their children. The concept is called parental responsibility: That is, the parent has a responsibility to make decisions, to look after the child,” she said. “Parenthood doesn’t give them rights; parenthood gives them responsibilities.”
And lawyer and ethicist Seema Shah describes the differences between American and British law this way:
Legally, though, US courts are following the same best-interest standard as the UK, but the way it works here, at least in practice, is that “courts are deferring to parents,” Shah said.
By the way, Jahi is still alive (although in a profoundly nonresponsive state) and in a lawsuit filed by her parents there are ongoing battles about whether she is brain dead or not. These cases are not only heartbreakingly sad but they tap into areas of medicine that are unsettled, such as the definition of brain death, as well as philosophical and religious questions about the meaning of life and suffering.
Those questions have no universally agreed-on answers, and I’m not offering any. I see these cases as dealing more with the question of how much the state can intervene to curtail the liberty of parents—not the liberty to cause the death of their child, but the liberty to try to sustain the life of their child. It seems unconscionable to me that they are not allowed to leave the country and avail themselves of whatever hope is left.
At the moment, Alfie is breathing on his own (with some oxygen support, perhaps intermittent?) and the legal battles continue. For example:
In Wednesday’s appeal hearing, Alfie’s legal team argued that the hospital’s original end-of-life plan was based on suppositions that the toddler needed oxygen to survive, Kiska said. The fact that Alfie lived on even without ventilation support was a material change in circumstance and served as grounds for renewing the matter.
It is in Alfie’s best interest to travel to Italy, where doctors are ready to care for him, the legal team argued in court…Professor Dominic Wilkinson, a consultant neonatologist at the John Radcliffe Hospital and director of Medical Ethics at the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford, said, “In Alfie’s case, none of the foreign experts have offered any new treatment or any new outlook for Alfie. The Italian specialists have apparently indicated that they believe that his care should be palliative.”…
Sometimes, the sad fact is that parents do not know what is best for their child,” Wilkinson said. “They are led by their grief and their sadness, their understandable desire to hold on to their child, to request treatment that will not and cannot help.”
I would add that Sometimes, the sad fact is that doctors do not know what is best for anyone. They are led by their hubris and their power, and their understandable desire to hold on to that power, to deny treatment that may not help although they have no way to absolutely know whether it will or won’t.
Remember that in this case no one is asking the British doctors to treat the child against their own medical judgment, and no one is asking the country to pay for the medical treatment of the child. Italy has volunteered to take on the burden. This is what makes the case so frightening—the courts are reaching into matters they have no business controlling. But it is the general nature of institutions to try to increase their power, is it not?
[NOTE: In connection with this, I suggest you take a look at my series of posts on ethicist Peter Singer. Very chilling.]
Very good and helpful analysis. Interesting detail about the difference in law with respect to parental rights. The case is indeed chilling, for the reasons you articulate so well.
It is the state saying it owns her citizens’ bodies, and if they don’t support treatment, then there will be no treatment. Period.
This is not new, of course. The NHS’s Liverpool Care Pathway was a program for withholding treatment, food, and water from patients beyond help and/or deemed not worthy of treatment. The doctors decided who was put on LCP, and had no obligation to consult or even inform the patient or his/her family.
Such, such are the joys…of the NHS….
(With apologies….)
The word you’re looking for is serf.
The government will spend whatever amount they think you’re worth, but once past that, too bad. Doesn’t matter if it is police, ambulance service, or in this case, health care.
Also, remember this case and Charlie’s when someone tells you that health care is a right.
Heard a report today on a guy who showed up at the hospital wearing his usual black and a large cross. Asked if he were a priest, he said no. Immediately, the people asked, where are the priests. Not there.
You’ll recall wrt Charlie Gard, the sick, sadistic control freaks wouldn’t let a clergyman in to pray with the family. Finally, they relented. A US clergyman did go with the family.
Where are the Brit clergy? Scared of getting crossways with the NHS, is my bet.
“Also, remember this case and Charlie’s when someone tells you that health care is a right.”
I always knew Aggies were insightful.
Government-run health care is a right only as long as the government deems you useful to the state. After that…not so much. And given that Italy has offered to take the child in and the NHS continues to actively try to kill him…beyond despicable.
When we start to measure the quality of human life and the cherish the sacred soul of human life then we can weigh and balance the cost and usefulness of each person. Kind of like the Germans in the 1930’s when they emptied the mental institutions and decided to polish up the racial composition of Germany and the countries they overran. A tiny step off of a steep slope can be dangerous for tiny people.
Having said that I do think there is a time to pull the plug and stop heroic medical measures but that is a family decision, at least in the United States. I don’t know if there is a lot of logic in what the parents are doing but it totally eludes me when the Brits once more, without them incurring more expense, allow this little boy to be taken to Italy.
I reread the Singer series where he tries to take emotion out of human behavior and relationships and apply logic to human needs and outcomes of decisions. I also think our countries steps towards allowing abortion very rapidly went from special circumstances in difficult situations with reservations to the making and killing of millions of little babies. Do these little almost people have souls, when I held my youngest granddaughter the day she was born last fall I felt that her soul had been around for awhile before her birthday.
I was a cautious pro-abortion person for a number of years but not anymore and I think this stuff, this life stuff all ties together.
” this life stuff all ties together.”
* *
Yes, it does, and it is related to the lack of belief in the soul — because, after all, once Alfie (Charlie, Jahi) are dead, there’s the end of it for them.
NR has several good articles up, especially Michelle Malkin’s, who adds a fourth erstwhile victim of the Healing Profession, but Haleigh actually recovered despite her doctor’s death sentence — after all, how is the government aka NHS refusing of oxygen, water, and food any different from lethal injection? — although perhaps they might refer to it as a post-birth abortion, which makes it all okay.
However, I think RedState hits the mark with this analysis of WHY the NHS is so obdurate, despite the common-sense arguments put forward in the children’s defense.
https://www.redstate.com/kiradavis/2018/04/25/real-reason-britain-wont-release-alfie-evans-italy/
“What is not logical and nearly incomprehensible is the decision of the court not simply to deny Alfie further treatment, but then deny his right and the right of his parents to leave the country to seek treatment elsewhere. Even that decision might make a tiny bit of sense if it were to add to the NHS’ costs. That would be a problem for that pesky algorithm. However, Italy had already sent an airlift equipped to take the young child. His transportation and hospital provisions were covered by donations and the state of Italy. In fact, to move Alfie out of the care of the NHS would only save them money and labor. Alfie’s parents would have one more shot at rescuing his life. It seems like a win-win for everyone.
And still, the courts have barred the family from leaving the country.
Let’s ponder that for just one moment. Great Britain is a nation with a proud history of freedom and democracy. Most other nations around the world and Britons themselves would describe it as a “free country”, and yet here is a case where its free citizens are not allowed to leave its borders.
Is this something that should happen in a “free country”? Would Alfie’s parents be barred from taking a vacation? Would anyone in their right mind in that country find it acceptable or consistent with British values to deny any family the right to leave for a vacation or to visit a relative abroad? Why then is it allowable for this family to be virtual hostages in their land simply because their reason for travel is medical care rather than pleasure?
Some years ago I watched a documentary on the design and building of the Berlin Wall between East Germany and West Germany. It included extremely rare clips of interviews with the architects (I was shocked to learn there was actually a deliberate design to that monstrosity).
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In one clip, an aging (former) East German Wall architect spoke briskly about the strategy of his designs. Although the interview was conducted during what must have been the last years of his life, he still seemed deeply resentful that he was being asked to defend the wall’s erection even after the fall of the Eastern Bloc. I’ll never forget what he said in that interview — it made the hair stand up on my arms.
With great sincerity — almost pleading with the interviewer — he said, “We had to build the wall. Too many people were leaving for the West and you need people to make socialism work. We had to build the wall to keep them in so they could see how great socialism was, so they could see that it works.”
…this man and his comrades felt that the only way to sell people on their socialist vision was to force them to live in it. Those leaving were just too stupid to understand that it was the best thing for them.
This is exactly the point in the ruling by the NHS and the courts to forbid their free citizens from leaving the country. If they are allowed to flee the heart-wrenching consequences of socialism, then others will want to do the same. How can a socialist system work without the cooperation of everyone? And how can you force people to participate in that socialist system when they discover that system may kill them or their loved ones?
Great Britain’s healthcare system cannot tolerate the defection of those who might find better healthcare somewhere else.
For some bizarre reason, a nation that boasts figures like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, a tiny island nation that was once so powerful and broad it was said that the sun never set on the British empire…for some inexplicable reason that nation has chosen to hang its pride and joy on socialized medicine.
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To release this child to the care of any other nation would be to admit failure, and heartless bureaucrats who will never have to watch young Alfie struggle for air or dehydrate to death have decided that their misplaced pride is more valuable than the lives of their citizens.
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“I’d rather pay higher taxes for “free” healthcare than deal with America’s health system,” they [her Canadian friends] often say.
To anyone who echoes such sentiments, let me point to poor, sweet Alfie Evans and his helpless parents as to why most Americans still abhor the idea of the government having the last say in whether or not you get the treatment you need to live.
Ask anyone here and 9 times out of 10 they’ll tell you they’d give their last dollar, sell their last possession, go into debt for the rest of their lives to save the life of someone they loved rather than sit helpless as their government sentences that person to death because it just isn’t “worth it”.
It’s never “worth it”…until it’s your child. When government controls your healthcare, they ultimately control what your life is worth to the people who love you.
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Alfie Evans may indeed have never really had a chance to survive his illness, but if there were a chance — one that would not cost the taxpayers of Great Britain — shouldn’t his parents be allowed to seek it out? Shouldn’t they, as citizens of a “free country” be allowed to leave its borders whenever they please and for whatever reason they please?
Sadly, Alfie — and little Charlie Gard before him — is doomed to be the sacrificial lamb at the altars of pride and socialism.
You will never convince me that this is right in any way. Never.
Because what this is… this is nothing short of real, actual, genuine evil.”
These are gut wrenching cases. My heart goes out to the parents. There is a cure. Find out where those who deny parents permission to ethically protect their children to give them a chance for life live and then take whatever measures said parents deem appropriate. Without consequences there is no cure. This is true in general, without consequences nothing changes.
J. E. Dyer also cites Davis’s article, and extends the dotted line to it’s ultimate conclusion.
https://libertyunyielding.com/2018/04/26/little-alfie-evans-exposes-brutal-totalitarian-state/
“Let’s just state that clearly. The British state will not allow parents who are blameless in every way, and against whom nothing wrongful is alleged, to take their child with them on a trip out of the country. The purpose of the ruling is to ensure that Alfie Evans dies.
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The inevitable consequence of “socializing” medical care is state decisions to enforce death. That’s what is being done to Alfie Evans.
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The parents are not allowed to take him out of a hospital where he is being starved and dehydrated to death. The Evans family is trying to flee that consequence. The state won’t let them.
The other thing the UK has doubled down on is speech it doesn’t like. The police have literally warned that they are monitoring social media for speech against the state’s actions on the Alfie Evans case, and that what they see “may be acted upon.”
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Dear friends, this is collectivist totalitarianism, full blown. Whether there are literal concentration camps is an administrative detail — at best, an accident of the calendar.
I suggest one more point we mustn’t miss. The end of collectivist totalitarianism is death. That’s what it is about: enforcing death. The slavery before death is a transitional arrangement.
In the UK, collectivist totalitarianism has labored over many decades to sell itself as an angel of light, in the guise of the National Health System. But the enforcement of death that we see with Alfie Evans (and with Charlie Gard last year) was always its end.
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Britain teeters on the brink tonight, asked to choose between life and death. We mortal men control neither, but we can align ourselves with one, or with the other.
They are not flip sides of a single coin. Our approach to them is not a choice between morally equal propositions. Aligning with life is about respect and hope. We constitute governments, as America’s Founders said in the Declaration of Independence, for precisely that purpose.
Aligning with death is about pride, pessimism, and power. Government should never hold a whip-hand over us for the latter purposes. We need public authority to prize life. We do not need a public authority that can overrule family or conscience to decree death.
Pray for Alfie Evans and his parents. But pray for Britain too. I have a feeling there will be no peaceful turning back, if the British state can’t find a way to align with life, and grant a little boy clemency.”
And a commenter adds:
“I will be spending several days in London this June. And I am no longer looking forward to it. The England that prosecutes postings on social media accounts and which wilfully sacrifices a baby’s life to defend its national health system is not an England I recognize. There is no valid reason not to allow the parents to take whatever desperate measures that would comfort them. It is almost as if the English system powers that be fear the baby might live, and thereby prove the baby was being euthanized because of concerns over the costs of a lifetime of care. That is certainly my suspicion. As for prosecuting people for social media posts, it seems easier to hunt down mean minded people, rather than actual violent criminals. What an inversion of principles.”
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The government is only extending the logic of unlimited abortion, which is “justified” by declaring that the child would be born to misery and a short life anyway, and thus should be killed in the womb.
Finding a cure for Alfie (or the others) would make a shambles of that “justification” — and even palliative care would, in their minds, legitimize birth over death.
What of the claim that it is too expensive to try to save Alfie’s life, and the money is needed for the care of others?
(never mind the people who offered to bear the costs for him, and earlier for Charlie)
They will spend millions to prevent a condemned murderer from being executed, no matter how heinous his crimes.
Is there no hypocrisy in these contradictory policies?
(I will not dignify them by calling them principles.)
This is the same totalitarian impulse that allowed hundreds of young girls to be raped and abused for years because it offended the Powers That Be to be called “racist” if they prosecuted the rapists. Or worse: revealed their proudly-supported “immigration” policies for the insanity that they are.
No people that sends its children into the fires of Moloch can survive.
* * *
parker Says:
April 26th, 2018 at 5:02 pm
…Without consequences there is no cure. This is true in general, without consequences nothing changes.
* *
The government is taking steps to ensure there are no consequences to the decision makers.
Yet.
No one can predict what will make a tipping point.
The argument that people are too stupid or deluded to know “what is in their best interests” is an argument frequently used by the Left/Communists to justify their coercive actions.
I’ve mentioned it before in other posts, but I found J. L Talmon’s 1952 book, “The Origin of Totalitarian Democracy” to be quite interesting, as it talks about how those on the Left used this very argument about people not knowing what was in their best interests, the good of the collective always taking precedence over the good of the individual and, therefore, having to coerce people to go down the correct pathway, even if it takes violence to make them do so.
To “force them to be free” as those on the Left defined “free.”
The Iron Curtain was put up for a reason.
Britain’s pedo and biogenics divisions are bidding high prices on the black market for the components.
They aren’t going to give some foreigners free resources.
For some bizarre reason, a nation that boasts figures like Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, a tiny island nation that was once so powerful and broad it was said that the sun never set on the British empire…for some inexplicable reason that nation has chosen to hang its pride and joy on socialized medicine.
Winston contributed to it. By winning WW2, the British people had so much faith in the government, if the unity of the British people could be done by the gov under war, what could it accomplish under peace time?
They replaced Winston soon after the end of the war, with the socialist PM.
FDR had a similar streak of socialist policies, although his was before not after.
Year Sakar – Sorry but there seems to be some confusion above, on March 5, 1946, Sir Winston Churchill visited Westminster College in Fulton Missouri and gave a speech in which he used the term Iron Curtin to describe what Stalin and the USSR had done at the end of WWII. At the end of that war Great Britain was hanging on by a thread and continued rationing until the late 1940’s.
And yes, the socialists, lower case who had sold out in the 1930’s came back into power for a bit.
As for FDR, he had a lot of socialist tendencies and an incredible ability to change and lead the USA during the war and of course his was before because he was dead and could not continue after the war. Just saying…..
I think England may soon reach the point where people just decide to shoot/slash judges and law officers purely for the hell of it.
Scarier is the news that Evans senior had a meeting with NHS bigs who explained the situation to him. He has complimented their professionalism and integrity. He loves Big Brother.
And yes, the socialists, lower case who had sold out in the 1930’s came back into power for a bit.
They didn’t come “back into power for a bit”. They instituted the complete transformation of Britain with national healthcare and other government first programs until Thatcher came along. They wouldn’t have needed Thatcher otherwise, to stop the trend.
Year Sakar — Sorry but there seems to be some confusion above
There’s no confusion above, you’re probably just misinterpreting what you read.
I didn’t connect Winston Churchill with the Iron Curtain. I quoted somebody else here who brought up Churchill. My comment on the Iron Curtain has to do with the OP about why Alfie or parents can’t do X.
OldTexan: what you should be sorry for has to do with the confusion you had when responding and arguing against this in the previous thread.
http://www.neoneocon.com/2018/04/23/the-waffle-house-shooting-and-guns/#comment-2383915
I noticed that you aren’t actually reading or paying attention to what I wrote. So why do you argue against it and then blame me for futile internet arguments.
Also, for the people that want to be the next Politically Correct thought police that also said Ymar is insulting Trum by using a 4 letter nickname that is not an insult, it’s just his name shortened down.
Notice that even when people write Ymar as Year, I don’t say that they are insulting me. There is no need to automatically jump on that band wagon just because you need Trum as a Hero King to save you from yourself or your nation from itself.
Normal or rational people don’t jump to those extreme conclusions, not unless they want to become clowns at least.
Speaking of futile internet arguments, it seems as though this thread is starting to descend into bickering.
After decades of doctoring and encountering myriad of these situations, though not in kids, I have come to conclude the Catholic Church is entirely correct. One of my patients, a woman in her 30s dying of ovarian cancer needed such high doses of opiates for pain relief that she was in a drug-induced coma her last days.
Most people think the Vatican just whirls out dogma, but if one reads Papal encyclicals, such as Pope St John Paul II’s “Fides et Ratio” (Faith and Reason) one sees how very learnedly philosophical the recent Popes have been.
“Humanae Vitae” (Of Human Life), written I believe before The Pill became universal, is another remarkable work.
The bottom-line ethical Catholic view is that one may never take a human life to end suffering, or because carrying on with supportive care is futile. Life is Life. Futility is in the eye of the beholder, and no one can know if a treatment will or will not be futile until it is tried! If we’d had this attitude in the 1960s when almost every child with cancer died, we’d never be where we are today, with 85-90% CURES.
This Life business of course extends to embryos formed at the moment of union of sperm and egg, the creation of a new individual by its DNA, a new unique human, at that very moment. Not feeling pain does not justify fetal murder. Though very rare, a few living humans have no pain perception whatever. It makes for a hazard-filled life!
It is not ethically wrong to have death result from a genuine and honest effort to extend life, relieve pain and suffering (e.g. oxygen hunger), provide fluids and calories, because death in those circumstances is not intended by any of these interventions.
Alfie Evans dies
I pray that this precious child can rest in peace. I do not know how the people of the UK tolerate the NHS murderers who make Dr. Mengele seem humane. And the legal system that abetted the murder.
One reason is that they allowed the government to disarm them.
Frog: “Futility is in the eye of the beholder, and no one can know if a treatment will or will not be futile until it is tried! If we’d had this attitude in the 1960s when almost every child with cancer died, we’d never be where we are today, with 85-90% CURES.”
And also polio (no iron lung while doctors work to discover the vaccine), heart transplants (because, at first, many people barely survived the procedure as the doctors improved the techniques and technology), and countless other life-saving interventions that were only possible because they studied and tested things on the people who were going to die if they did nothing — what if they had just DONE NOTHING?
The defeatist posture of the Left is one of its core principles, judging by what they do rather than what they say.
Because the ultimate goal is to remove all people who don’t bow down to the Idol (Supreme Soviet, King, NHS, whatever the current garb).
https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/alfie-evans-post-mortem/
“King declared that she and the other two justices on the panel didn’t understand “why the father’s proposal involved Alfie being transferred to both Italy and Munich.” Two things, Lady Justice. First, you already solved that mystery, in the preceding sentence: Alfie’s parents wanted to move with him to what they regarded as “a more empathetic environment.” You formulated that nicely. Second: Your concern that they might have encountered hardships abroad and then your stopping them – for their own good, of course, as you saw it – from taking action that was a little bolder than you might have taken were misplaced. They were not your children, and even if they were they were not children.
You know the drill: She was only discharging her duty to ensure the child’s “best interest.” She wouldn’t let him go to Rome because he could have died on the plane en route, but she wouldn’t let him continue on life support either, because she deemed it “futile” in the face of his “inevitable death.” His father said, in effect, What’s to lose? If Alfie had to die somewhere, better on a flight to the Holy City, wouldn’t you say, than under the thumb of the National Health Service in Liverpool? Then King played the pain card, saying that Alfie might be capable of feeling it so no air travel on that account, though she quoted a doctor who said he probably wasn’t, and she forgot or passed over the widespread use of anesthesia, a word that occurs nowhere in her 16,000-word opinion.
“I suspect that it is a response to an ideological battle,” Mariella Enoc, president of Bambino Gesé¹, said earlier this week when asked about what turned out to be the last court decision, on April 25, to block the transfer of Alfie to Rome. Enoc, who happens to be an anesthesiologist, said she thought that the judge’s reasoning was not “strictly” legal. “I suspect that there is hostility to the Vatican hospital,” she said, beating the British authorities at what is supposed to be their own game of understatement.
The high-handed treatment by U.K. doctors and judges is hard to separate from their disregard for the intangible value that the Catholic hospital offered, that the young couple sought, and that the state prevented them from enjoying. The state had no place there. Its intrusion will not be forgotten any time soon.
“The hospital withdrew Alfie’s life support Monday,” the Associated Press reports, “after a series of court rulings sided with doctors.” Sided with doctors. Which ones?
Alfie Evans died at 2:30 a.m. BST on April 28, the feast of Saint Peter Chanel, a martyr. Requiescat in pace.”
What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie
I know there’s something much more,
Something even non-believers can believe in
I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you’ve missed you’re nothing, Alfie
When you walk let your heart lead the way
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie
Alfie
Songwriters: Burt Bacharach / Hal David
Alfie lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC
Requiescat In Pace
neo-neocon Says:
April 27th, 2018 at 10:29 pm
Speaking of futile internet arguments, it seems as though this thread is starting to descend into bickering.
Every time you have to clarify what you actually meant and wrote to someone that claimed different. It’s the same thing.
To Aesop:
Whether the Church of England or the Vatican, State religions have always plagued human harmony and rest.
This world was too hardcore for you Alfie. Maybe in some other transmigration cycle you’ll get another chance. Make sure you talk to the people in charge about it.