Portugal. The country that once launched caravels to chart unknown oceans now finds its police hunting for accomplices in a case of two boys abandoned beside a road. This is not the Fall of Rome, but it is a symptom of the same decadence.
The sight of children left like discarded cargo on the asphalt is a stench that rises from a society that has lost its moral compass, a civilisation corroding from within. The Victorian era, for all its hypocrisies, had a horror of such neglect. It was an age of philanthropic societies that would have mobilised the entire parish to find the guilty.
Today, we have police hunts and news cycles. But do we have the collective outrage that such an act demands? The answer is no.
Our outrage has been dulled by a thousand smaller outrages, each one chipping away at the foundation of our shared values. We live in an age of intellectual decadence, where every moral principle is questioned and every transgression is contextualised. The accomplices are not just the ones who left the boys there.
They are the educators who taught that moral relativism is a virtue, the politicians who prioritise identity over duty, and the intellectuals who sneer at the very concept of national character. Portugal, once a nation of explorers, is now a nation of spectators. We watch the drama unfold on our screens, tut-tut, and then return to our consumerist pursuits.
The boys will be saved, physically, but what of the soul of the nation? The accomplices are all of us who fail to demand a better world. Or, more precisely, all of us who fail to admit that the world has grown worse.
The police will find their men. But the deeper culprits will remain at large, walking among us, often in the highest offices. They will write editorials about social causes while ignoring the rot at the core.
They will lament the symptom but refuse to diagnose the disease. And so the caravels will rust in the harbour, and the lost boys will multiply on the roadsides.
