What price is the West willing to pay to retain its culture?

St Aidan’s Church was hoping to host a New Year’s Eve event this year, however, due to the cost of security, it had to be be cancelled. Their meagre $3,000 budget would have easily been dwarfed by the $10,000 costs for security alone¹.

The church’s senior minister, Craig Potter, who seems to be an overly-insightful individual, made some comments which would have been simple, plain-speaking twenty years ago, which today would verge on criminality. Potter even had the temerity to blame the cancellation on ‘Islamist extremists’.

In the past … council provides barriers to prevent an accident, but what we now have to do is prevent a deliberate attack. This means you can’t just use the traditional barriers you have to use jersey kerbs or water fuelled barriers, which then puts the cost right out of the water for us. [Craig Potter]

From preventing an unfortunate accident, to preventing a deliberate attack, in just twenty years, is an astonishing accomplishment in anyone’s books, but today we are told to just shrug, or tweet, or carry on as if this is normal. Well, maybe it is, and all of the oldthinkers out there will just have to catch up, or shut up.

On the other hand, Sydney’s official New Year’s Eve ‘party‘ is still going ahead for those Aussies let down by the church cancellation. But there are costs associated with not cancelling things, as cities around the world are finding out, even as those in authority continue to associate this recent security phenomenon to nothing in particular.

And if that’s not doom and gloom enough for you, there’s Germany, easily one of the happiest and most rape-fiiled geographic regions on earth at the moment. In Berlin, they have also not cancelled their city’s official New Year’s Eve ‘festivities‘². This non-cancellation of the ‘celebration‘ also has a cost. A separate ‘safe zone‘ for women will be set up, a massive police presence will be needed, trained psychological personnel will be on hand, and the now-usual diversity barriers, security checkpoints, sniffer dogs, metal detectors and bomb-scanning resources will still be required. A low estimate for the security to the event is €100,000, a veritable bargain for Berlin’s taxpayers when you consider the alternative.

But it’s not just the financial cost of course, it’s the psychological cost this is having on the interaction between the people and their remaining culture. The fact that city planners now consider whether to have trained psychologists available for a ‘festive‘ occasion creates a mental friction, a cognitive dissonance, that just won’t go away. It doesn’t feel right. It seems skewed, twisted, out of place. Unusual. Not normal. Wrong.

So here in the West we can still decide whether to cancel an event because the security implications are just way too onerous, or we can hold the event, pay a heavy price, and keep our fingers crossed. And as long as we allow our leaders to lie about the root cause, perhaps we’ll need more of those psychologists to help us cope with our mounting irrational fears.

¹ Daily Mail. Stephen Johnson; ”It’s just evil’: Church overlooking Sydney Harbour forced to cancel their popular New Year’s Eve fireworks party over TERROR fears – because they can’t afford the $10,000 bill for security and bollards to stop an attack’

² Breitbart, Chris Tomlinson; ‘Berlin to Set Up Women-Only ‘Safe Spaces’ For New Year’s Eve’