Disappearing babies

There are four things in America for which there is little forgiveness. The first is killing your wife, as O.J. Simpson discovered. The second is allegations of child molestation, as Michael Jackson found. The third is being old, as John McCain is rapidly discovering. And the fourth is having too many children, as I have found.

Looking down at primitives with "too many" children is one of the last acceptable prejudices in the West. With our ninth child expected imminently, God willing, I find myself pitied and pilloried wherever I go. "Wow, that's a lot of kids," is a refrain I constantly hear. What a shame I didn't have instead, say, eight antique cars, or better, eight homes around the world, for which I would have been thought a success. But eight kids? That proves your either a religious kook or someone ruining the environment by overpopulating the earth.

Enter The New York Times Magazine this past Sunday with a cover story called "Childless Europe" which claims that the Germans, Italians, the French and the Bulgarians are disappearing off the face of the earth due to a shockingly low birthrate, or what demographers call "lowest-low fertility." This truly ominous article relates that for the first time on record, birthrates in parts of Europe have dropped below 1.3 per family.

"For the demographers, this number has a special mathematical portent. At that rate, a country's population would be cut in half in 45 years, creating a falling-off-a-cliff effect from which it would be nearly impossible to recover." In Germany "where the births-to-deaths ratio now results in an annual population loss of roughly 100,000, the government's family minister declared that if her country didn't reverse its plummeting birthrate, "we will have to turn out the light."' Italy is dealing with the crisis by paying parents to have children, and Russia has national make-love days where they encourage couples to go home and conjure up a child.

Pope Benedict summed it up best. "Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present."

WHILE THE article blames the falling birthrate on poor government policies that do not enforce maternity leave or subsidize post-natal care, as well as inflexible working conditions for women, a far more important reason is growing Western narcissism. As the West becomes richer, it is also becoming more self-absorbed.

Children consume time and resources both of which young adults would rather focus on themselves. Better to have the freedom, and the cash, to jet to Paris for the weekend than push a kid on some dumb swing. Not that we don't love kids any more. We do, but in an abstract, as-long-as-it-doesn't-interfere-with-our-freedom kind of way. Having them in our thirties, and about one or two max, minimizes the disruption.

Never before in history has a civilization skewed more away from the needs of the community and toward the aggrandizement of the individual. In the US, a warrior class consisting of about two percent of the population fights bad guys in Baghdad and gets blown up in Kabul while the rest of us go on Facebook to update our "friends" as to our emotional state. The regular flow of Facebook status updates telling us that "Jane feels like shopping today" or "Mort misses his ex-girlfriend Linda" feeds the Truman Show mentality of American youth who are taught to believe that the whole world revolves around them. Sacrifice be damned.

The most powerful TV show in modern American history is American Idol. The title is telling. It promises that you too can grow to be a puffed-up celebrity. Meanwhile, when I approached several television executive friends and pitched a family healing show for the brave military families that have to be re-integrated after a hero returns from Iraq, I was told that the military doesn't rate on TV. We simply don't want to be reminded of the selfish lives we are leading by watching the selfless lead theirs.

When you ask twenty-something Westerners to contemplate parenthood - with its diapers, school runs, and estimated $250,000 cost of raising a child to adulthood - they think you fell off the moon. Spend my life focused on someone else, even if it is my own child - have you gone mad?

When you later tell them that the very future of their nation depends on it, they gaze with the same incredulity. The idea of doing almost anything for their country, baby-making included, is utterly foreign to them. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Jewish singles continue to attend a truly staggering variety of singles events in Manhattan in a never-ending quest to find the best. Do they deserve any less?

BUT LOOK at what is lost when young people delay having children until their mid-thirties and then have one kid. At risk is not only the morbid disintegration of once great nations like Japan and South Korea, both of whom average 1.1 child per family, or half the replacement rate, but something far more fundamental. When children have no siblings, they don't learn to share as much and they don't assume responsibility for taking care of one another. And the condition of being an only child runs the risk of fostering the very narcissism we decry, as the child becomes the epicenter of his parent's life with no other children to distract them.

And is it good for boys to grow up without sisters, given that one of our society's greatest problems is growing male disrespect for women? The boy who feels a filial connection with a girl who is his sister remembers the feeling of how he wants her to be treated when he dates someone else's sister.

I know the complaint that too many kids in a family means that each will get less parental attention. The simple response to this absurd argument is that attention is a poor substitute for real love. Celebrities get attention, while family members get love. A child who is immersed in an environment where he is surrounded by the love of both parents and siblings is a child who never feels alone.

Everywhere you look these days, people are becoming grandparents at about 70. But how many years does that leave a child to grow close to his grandparents, learn from their wisdom, and connect with an older generation? By the time the child is 10, his grandparents are already octogenarians who are often growing more physically dependent and infirm.

The Western cult of narcissism is spoiling our kids, making us neglectful of our elders, spawning an out-of-control material insatiability, and destroying us - quite literally - by having us die off without a replacement generation.

And of all the many remedies available that might free us from our growing self-absorption, having one more baby than we originally planned for our marriages is the best remedy of all.

Well, for starters, RJR_fan, I don’t live near a university, seeing as I am one of those doomed to live in “flyover-land”.

And, if I did live near one, my natural grannie urge to cuddle, smell sweet babies after the nighty-nite bath, rocking them to sleep with an off key lullaby probably wouldn’t go over with “ adopted graduate muslim students”.

And they definitely wouldn’t appreciate the affectionate licks from my two Belgian Sheepdogs, who are my ever-present “posse”.

And, we do like to eat ham, pork sausage, and all that other disgusting stuff.

Alas, the opportunities I am missing, all because I am such an infidel!

Is it narcissistic to care about family?
What of expecting that your skills and efforts should be rewarded beyond that of the slackers?
To each according to his needs sure sounds nice.

If we are created in the spiritual image and likeness of G-d, then we should care about the whole world, as he does.
Firstly, as humans, we cannot possibly car this same way G-d does. We do not see into human souls or have perfect knowledge.
Secondly, All humans are G-d's creations or children. That makes the relationship quite different. I would hope that you love your daughter far more than a random girl her.
Finally, I can't recall anywhere were tribe and family are to be ignored.
I'm sure that you will quote Chriostian scriptures and give the line about Jew and Gentile being one in Christ. (This also creates a new tribe, Christians. It doesn't end the old ones.) However, Jesus also said to render unto Caeser that which is his.

Being as much like G-d in his compassion is something to aspire to. We can never be perfect. The love of a mother for her child is probably the wellspring of all our compassion, so it is nothing to be sniffed at. Family brings out our deepest feelings, especially when we can count on it staying together--that's how we learn to "take one another for granted" in the most beautiful sense of that phrase and thus feel free to be ourselves and still get unconditional love.

I never said "to each according to his needs." I'm not a communist! That isn't what I meant by caring about the world. I meant it in a spiritual sense, caring about the values and spirit of everyone. And specifically I reject the notion of intentionally increasing the numbers of one's own tribe not for survival but for dominance over other groups. It's wrong plus it can't work.

The scripture quote I would see as more apropos is the one about leaving family members behind in order to follow the Lord. Although your quote is great too. He's the only one we can ever be "all one" in, since he's the one who tells us to care about one another.

“The la raza and mecha dolts ...and their Vatican masters.”

They are so far removed from any papal influence that just making the comment is an absurdity.

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