Posted on 06/30/2008 4:18:23 PM PDT by SJackson
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.
i get it all the tme when I mention that I am one of nine children...
“Americas babies are coming from non-citizens.”
The la raza and mecha dolts routinely declare that they “...will conquer America through the wombs of our women.”
Western values are promoted by Western children.
......The la raza and mecha dolts ...and their Vatican masters
True, but my wife and I will be US citizens in two years...
Not everyone moving to the US is an illegal...
We have 3 children, all US born.
As an aside, I like the author’s reference to the 2% warrior class. I can only dream of a day when the members of that class are actually recognized as such. I hear so much from politicians about “the debt owed these soldiers”, yet payment of that debt so often takes the form of words or meaningless gestures.
How about a revitalized, efficient VA system, at least a lifetime deduction on fed income tax for those who served in a combat zone (though obviously eliminated would be better), reduced (or eliminated) fees for things such as license plates (we already have special plates for vets in most states, how about an adjusted rate to go with them). As long as I’m dreaming, I wouldn’t mind seeing such “super-citizens” accorded some form of additional social status privilege in society.
/rant
“Your gonna have to buy a LOT of carbon credits to cover those 9 C02 emitters Shmuley, get out your checkbook and send a check to:”
And how many Gore children are there? Three, or is it four? I believe Al needs to buy some more carbon credits himself.
I’ve heard their are other ways to promote Western values. But nah, that can’t be true. You must be right. Roll out them babies.
Just read your home page. Maya Grace is beautiful, and to think you have two new blessings coming into your life soon.
Please let us know when they arrive.
You are truly blessed.
Yeah, but Westerners are too soft to promote those other methods.
There are too many great points in this piece to single any one out. What this writer has described is a primary symptom of the slow but steady death of Western culture.
Wow, I must have started early. I was a grandma by the time I was 40.
I am regretful that we stopped at four. I wish we had gone on to have a dozen.
Why? Because one of the four was called home to heaven early.
And, the three are grown and flown to far off places. I always thought I would have a bunch of adult children dropping by, grandchildren under my feet, and family all around.
Alas, they are all scattered to the four corners. I wish for grandchildren close by to love, hug, and to tell stories about the old days. We only get that a few days a year, if we are lucky.
And I have no doubt they will. Of course, then they'll turn it into a larger version of Mexico and have to start looking around for a new Goose that lays Golden Eggs.
Abstinence from child-rearing, also, is part of a system of values albeit one which will not be able to sustain itself for much more than half a century from now. The math doesn't lie, and the moral void created by European nihilism will be filled by something. The question is, what?
Nihilism is not the only reason people don’t have children. For some, it is a deep concern for the world, the very opposite of nihilism.
That is not criticism. It is a lot of kids. Even back in the good ol' days that was a lot of kids. Especially considering that then to have eight living children you would probably have gone through 20 pregnancies.
It is quite an accomplishment. So "wow" indeed.
Nope that trend is reversing. Now it is the more educated and wealthier who are having three, four or five children.
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