Posted on 01/26/2009 4:37:27 PM PST by Yaelle
While it may be very unpleasant for us to realize that lowering the number of helpless people dependent on hardworking Americans for their survival will help our economy get back on the right track, Nancy Pelosi has a solid point about salvation through contraception. Still, can we dare to insist that people refrain from bringing new life into the world? Young people crave becoming parents. Working hard to support their babies is not drudgery for most young parents; indeed, it's a labor of love. And, notwithstanding, most contraception devices fail at least 20% of the time, and abortion is abhorrent to some Americans.
It's time to focus on Ms. Pelosi's solution with our hearts and minds, and realize where the burden of population hurts our economy the most. For which people do Americans most resent working longer hours and paying extra in taxes? Certainly not the chubby-cheeked, adorable babies in strollers all across this nation. Not the pigtailed little girls running races in their mary jane sneakers on the playground, nor the lanky young men playing basketball or studying hard to make something of themselves. We all see the promise of a better day in their smiling faces.
Today, Americans are living into their eighties with ease, and many are still alive long into their nineties. While some of our senior citizens are prized for their knowledge and adored by their relatives, many have become woefully unproductive as members of society. Our finest corporations spend more than 50% of their payroll expenditures on their retirees, in pensions and healthcare. Social Security and Medicare were killing us before Bush added the additional $350 billion entitlement of the Seniors Prescription Act. As more and more Baby Boomers pass the retirement age, our economy will be stunned with the amount of taxpayer money needed to support these people far into this century, and it will only get worse as the decades pass.
Crinkly old faces, smelly gray heads, and dementia-induced repetition do not endear taxpayers to put out up to 70% of their income to support others. American workers secretly resent that their better years are spent slaving away to support people whose time has passed, who have no longer any "skin in the game," to borrow a phrase from the President. The elderly often demand health care that could only have been dreamed of in earlier decades. All of these new treatments and options cost money, and these costs are unfairly burdening the young and the strong.
While Nancy Pelosi has correctly seen that our economic system would function in a more streamlined fashion if only we needed less people to support, she did not quite understand that asking people not to have babies goes against the desires of young adults. Today, most twenty-somethings are entranced by celebrity babies and precious miniature fashion, drippy preschool paintings, and baby hiphop classes. It would be unAmerican to ask these young people not to procreate. Yet these same Americans have a hard time pretending they enjoy supporting other people's grandparents in relative luxury while they themselves must scrimp on electronics or vacations.
I only ask that we stop to consider what will most spur the emotions of young taxpaying Americans today. When our younger American workers are happy, and feel good about themselves, they will work hard and succeed, and make our great nation a gleaming strong economic machine once more. This will not happen if they lose the ability to have precious tiny versions of themselves, waiting for their turn to be young and strong and working for America as well. Yet if we could even reduce our senior citizen population by half, not only would they probably not be missed but billions of dollars are freed up for creating jobs both in the public and private sectors.
Nancy Pelosi must bring up the unpleasant subject of asking our elderly to sacrifice for our great nation. We are not asking a lifetime. We would only need to lower our national lifespan average by five to ten years a head in order to be able to sustain the streamlined economy so many of us dream about. So many of these years are spent attached to a bedpan in a lonely wheelchair, unable to work or to bring anything of note to our society. In many ways, giving up those last few years will actually be a pleasure for our seniors. And how promising those years will be indeed to a new generation of healthy, young Americans, on whose dreams this country is built.
I thought it might be better to finish with that, rather. I did add "satire" to the keywords. Maybe it was not enough.
No, you miss the point. The piece is brilliant for that is what will become of us if you take Pelosi’s statement to its logical conclusion. Of course Yaelle is not supporting this idea, simply illustrating absurdity. Nancy has proposed the slipperiest of slopes. Be afraid, be very afraid. Our grandchildren will have no other choice.
I liked it, but I hope Nancy never sees it...
Mods, can we put (apologies to Jonathan Swift) into the title? Some Freepers are growing a mite upset with me here...
One big point that people aren’t considering is that, a scenario where the elderly will be the first to be sacrificed will be with a Nationalized Health Care System.
There won’t be enough resources and enough money to take care of all that get sick, and the first to be sacrificed will be the elderly who aren’t able to take care of themselves or who can’t pay to have someone else to take care of them.
Choices will have to be made and those who have already lived their lives the most will be the first to be “sacrificed” for the greater good.
Medicines will be provided to the younger generations if there won’t be enough to go around. And transplants won’t be wasted on that same elderly generation.
Things like that will make perfect sense to people like Pelosi and the majority of people who have selected people like her will be the most deserving for being “selected” out.
It is an excellent satire piece. It is the way we are going so it will not be satire for long.
After contraception was introduced, I believe it was Pope Paul 6 (someone correct if I am wrong) that said the stages if this evil was accepted would be, contraception, abortion, infanticide, uptick in murder battery domestic violence, eugenics, euthenasia of the terminally ill for “mercy”, selective birth for characteristics, and willful murder of those without a quality of life deemed worthy of living,including the elderly, infirm, and mentally or physically challenged.
Catholics poo pooed him in large numbers saying none of this would ever happen, remember, abortion was not legal at this time, nor was technology available widely to do many of the things we do like stem cell stuff and the like. But he had knowledge of Hitler and his death camps, experiments on humans, and acceptace and encouragement of abortion. Things that most people did not talk about above a whisper and never in mixed company.
Seems as though we are there and then some, and in a much shorter time span than anyone would have thought.
You both are right. My religion does not forbid contraception but definitely discourages it. And there is no artificial contraception that works 100% for married couples (obviously excepting abstinence) anyway; G-d has a hand in that too. I know a woman who gave birth to a healthy child after having her “tubes tied.”
Only the Almighty has a right to say who belongs here on the planet and who does not. We are not dogs to be either neutered or “put to sleep.” (Not meaning to insult our fine canine companions.)
Hey Yaelle, how about less Government dependency, more $$ in the hands of We The People, and encouraging nuclear families where we take of our own?
I’m willing to meet you halfway - I’m a geezer who would be happy to help some 20-somethings procreate. We all have to make sacrifices for our country.
Um, yeah. Precisely. I actually agree with the bipartisan Limbaugh-Obama plan. Since he thought of it, I daresay he should get top billing.
See, people? Now here is the kind of American who's not afraid to get out there and get things done! Good on you, sir! ;)
The only point I’ll concede to Pelosi is that the truth about birth control is that the “haves” exercise it to the largest degree and the “have-nots” do not. Or, let me put it more specifically. The good, decent, hard-working people tend to have less children than the welfare-recipients. I can logically conclude one reason for this as being that when one is not working, one has more, ahem, time to spend on the activity that begets a child. Meanwhile, the welfare-recipients who have 3, 4, 5 or so children do drag us all down. Not because children are a burden or because we should not embrace life, but because the people who tend to have large numbers of them (exclusive of religious Christians, Orthodox Jews, and so on), also tend to be the non-working poor, or even the working poor. They are given incentives to keep it up as well since the government does not cut them off after a certain number of illegitimate children.
Okay, that’s my thought. As for the elderly, I think how a society views and treats its elderly and those who cannot produce has muc hto say about that society’s morals and beliefs. I shudder at the thought of where this might lead.
Read it again, read through the comments... It is satire. We disagree on your former point but agree on your latter.
Of course, it’s already being done in the UK. Once you hit a certain age there, you are not allowed certain procedures - you can pay yourself of course but you are not allowed the procedure through the NHS.
I will and if your post is indeed satire, I apologize. Having satire in the title, would save you the thrashing. What is currently going on in the last seven days is anything but funny or filled with satire.
Joni, read through the comments. It really is written in satire.
Personally, I don’t want my tax dollars going to any kind of welfare. I definitely want to support those who truly are too disabled to care for themselves, and that is about it. I also love private organizations and schools that help those less fortunate. I concede no point to Pelosi at all.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.