Major spoilers below.
It’s not a new monthly subscription service for your parakeet. “Bird Box” is the hit Netflix adaptation, starring Sandra Bullock, of Josh Malerman’s novel. It has already received 45 million streams.
The movie is a much better version of M. Night Shyamalan’s premise in “The Happening.” In this one, horrendous, Cthulu-sketched beings from another dimension cannot wait to aid humanity’s current fascination with self-genocide.
If your eyes are not covered, you see the creatures, they infect you, and you immediately strive to end your life. Bullock survives, despite many challenges, by keeping a blindfold over her eyes throughout much of the film. In “Walking Dead” fashion, she receives a radio transmission promising sanctuary from the murderous force of nature.
After a perilous journey, Sandra makes it to the sanctuary, where she is saved by…blind people. A sanctuary from the murderous force of nature exists because someone once established a school for the blind. Based on “Bird Box’s” premise, you have to be a sighted person in order to receive suicidal overtures from the alien race. Thus, the school for the blind and its pupils serves as a fortuitous antidote to the alien invasion.
The rescue of sighted persons by blind persons seemed an interesting twist, especially for the West’s fascination with a culture of death. Currently, seven states and the District of Columbia allow some form of physician-assisted suicide in America. Abortion remains the law of the land after 45 years. Seven nations in Europe offer some type of means to end one’s life.
The film’s rescuers really spark the imagination when one takes into account the successful eugenics practice of abortion in Iceland. There are now almost no Down Syndrome children or adults on the island due to prenatal screening practices. Almost 100 percent of Icelandic parents who receive the news their baby might have Down Syndrome chose to terminate their child’s life. The thought of raising a child with special needs, and the West’s infatuation with living their “best life now,” allows no room for a special-needs child in the family.
Reach further back in history to Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, and examine her speech “My Way to Peace.” She advocates eugenics in order to reach a more peaceful society. In essence, she says that if one has less-desirable traits, it is society’s responsibility to ensure those traits are not passed to the next generation. Charles Darwin’s survival of the fittest needs just a little nudge in the West to ensure the best-fit pass on their genes.
These ideas again took form when Adolf Hitler used his T-4 program to purge the “master race” from the “mentally unfit.” Once the world entered the post-Holocaust era, the horrors of eugenics took particular foothold with abortion and physician-assisted suicide. Canada is debating whether to allow parents to terminate living, breathing children who have a severe mental disability or terminal illness. The slippery slope to allow adults to end their lives has left the door open to extend suicide to children.
If one is tuned into the happenings of culture, one is already aware of the moral decay of Western society. The above is not new information. However, are we always aware of heroes with birth defects or abnormalities, who help us see life through fresh eyes.
Twenty-two-year-old Nick Santonastasso is one of only four surviving people affected by the genetic disorder called Hanhart Syndrome. Despite missing limbs, his parents challenged him to dress himself and overcome the depression and anxieties of his disabilities. He is currently a successful entrepreneur and motivational speaker.
Also consider Nick Vujicic, a man born with no arms or legs, who communicates his faith and motivational message of hope to the down-and-out. Nick reaches tens of thousands each year and finds ways to live meaningfully in accordance with his life goals.
Sanger’s solution for the Nicks of our world would be to kill or sterilize them to ensure their physical deformities never have the chance to pass on to the next generation. Parents in Iceland likely would end the lives of other potential Nicks out of convenience. Still others might ponder a sonogram and question the quality of life the Nicks might have, then deem an abortion an act of mercy. Canada may eventually make the end of a deformed baby’s life possible sometime after birth.
John Knight writes about a survey conducted on the happiness levels of people with Down Syndrome. Almost 100 percent answered affirmatively they “are happy with their lives,” “like who [they] are,” and “love [their] family.” These are startling statistics. Iceland ends the lives of those who would be happy with their lives, like who they are, and love their family. These are exactly the qualities of life those in the West chase, sometimes by killing such people.
According to an article by Maggie Fox, those with no physical deformities or mental handicaps that affect cognitive abilities report rising rates of depression at drastic rates. The article reports that people report a “lack of community,” while children and adolescents report a sensation of “rushed and pressured.” Challenges with depression can also be passed down genetically from an ancestor. Would Sanger want to deter individuals with depression from passing their genes onward, too?
Perhaps it is possible that America and the West’s “Bird Box,” as well as its saviors, stares us in the face. The self-inflicted eugenics of the West weed out our most vulnerable among us, just like the alien force that invades the world in “Bird Box.” Despite—or perhaps partially because of—all of our attempts to make the world “purer,” many who remain alive report higher rates of depression as an overall population.
However, just like the blind saviors of “Bird Box,” our society’s exemplars like Santonastasso, Vujicic, and those with Down Syndrome prove to us that happiness is more than the things that so easily beset us or the challenges of the material world. Instead, they create a sanctuary of sorts to help us value the things that truly matter in life. Those with Down Syndrome, especially, experience what the West seems to lack: happiness and fulfillment.
Perhaps if America and the West were not bent on eliminating our exemplars, we could learn how to view life the ways our most fulfilled members do. Just like the blind saviors in “Bird Box,” we might be saved. Nevertheless, with the West’s current support of eugenics initiatives, if “Bird Box” were a real-life event, soon there might not be any blind people left to save Sandra Bullock.
