Children: Vanity, Accident, or Biological Imperative?Children: Vanity, Accident, or Biological Imperative?
I started out intending to write about one of
my favorite subjects, coffee. However, the tiresome fact that yet another female person I
have daily contact with has recently spawned another little human being (albeit with
considerable help and support from a male member of society) momentarily derailed this
intent and made me start to muse for what must be the umpteenth time about what it is that
makes us all think that having children is such a wonderful...nay, even
"blessed"...event. Therefore, I'll save the subject of Mrs. Olson, Juan Valdez,
and that magik fluid that starts out as Robusta and Arabica beans, grown 'high in the
flavor zone', for another monthly rant.
As a person who has no children of my own--through
deliberate intent--I have frequently stopped to wonder about the questionable wisdom of
having children in an age as wretchedly difficult to raise them in as is our own. Numerous
studies have shown us that it is a well established fact that the higher one's educational
achievements and economic status are, the fewer children one tends to have; of inversely
proportionate relevance is the fact that the lower one's education and economic
circumstances, the larger the family tends to be. This unhappy fact is without a doubt
responsible for the large numbers of absolute idiots we have wandering around our American
streets today--undoubtedly all lame-brained offspring of equally lame-brained parents who
should never have been allowed to procreate freely in the first place.
Regrettably, normative (remember that "normal" doesn't mean "correct",
but only that a particular attitude is held or subscribed to by a majority of the given
group) social sanctions prevent us from neutering anyone with an IQ of less than 100, so
we here in American have more than our share of largely unthinking, knee-jerk-reactive
souls of the utmost simplicity in our midst to contend with, as a direct result. You know
the type, having seen them in endless display on the evening news, the type who commit
mass murder, lead policemen on methamphetamine-induced rampages on our highways, and being
interviewed in all their ignorant glory by perfectly coifed news anchors who are about as
sympathetic to their very human miseries as Adolph Hitler or Idi Amin.
When one truly sits and reflects on American society today, it seems a wonder to me that
ANYONE would want to create more little human beings in their own image to clutter up an
already full-to-bursting world. When you consider that given the oppressively harassed
nature of the life we ordinary Americans are forced to live (thanks to the corporate
masters of our economy who regard us all as little more than faceless consumers of their
products), and especially the fact that no matter how hard you try to give your kids some
sort of positive social consciousness, everything you have strived to inculcate in them is
completely undone through contact with all their little dimbulb peers that populate our
American public schools, it would seem to me that having children ranks up there alongside
such massively stupid contemporary foibles as donating large amounts of money to the
American Red Cross after the 11th of September events.
And yet, everywhere I turn I
witness yet another young friend and his wife announcing yet another "blessed
event" and actually expecting others to congratulate the "lucky" couple
(whose principle achievement has actually been being too intellectually dull to fully
appreciate just exactly what it is that they have gotten themselves into). So Joe Wanger
and Susie Bighips have had a baby: so what?! All that they have done is set a chain of
events into motion that will require the rest of their life energies to carry through,
since they will be too busy providing for this new human life to have the luxury (or
perhaps the curse?) of regarding anything more intellectually demanding than where the
next set of diapers is coming from, or who is going to sit up all night with the squalling
brat.
In America, where having children is still a popular pastime--especially among lower
income groups (particularly those least prepared and able to provide for a child)--it is
now almost impossible to provide the sort of proper upbringing required for raising a new
child. Not only does mom and dad have little if any time left over from the office work to
spend with the kid, the fact that he is entering public schools (which are little more
than mandatory holding pens for those too ignorant to achieve anything more positive than
mastering the art of wiping their own behinds) practically insures that the child will
immediately sink to the absolutely lowest common denominator in that particular,
ostensibly 'educational', setting.
Then, too, there is the "college thing" to worry about. Instead of wisely
accepting the fact that an academic education is NOT suitable for everyone (given the
wildly varying range of intellects extant) and instead maintaining a system wherein there
are two equally suitable life scripts to follow (academics being one and the
"trades" being the other, such as is the convention in Europe), the average
American parent has been brainwashed by politically correct social crusaders into thinking
that EVERY child needs a college degree to make it through life. In fact, nothing could be
further from the truth. Not only is not every child in need of higher academic learning,
the fact that in America "higher education" has been perversely prostituted into
simply a large skilled-job training program for commercial businesses and corporations
means that all today's average college degree guarantees is POSSIBLE entry into the
corporate American manpower pool. And what a shock today's college graduates face when
they learn that an undergraduate collegiate education, which traditionally used to produce
an actualised, broadly aware and cultivated member of society, is really only a slightly
more sophisticated job-skills certification for their chosen career field in American
commerce (that is assuming they even come to that awareness--most never do).
Europe, far more sophisticated in these areas of awareness, long ago realised
that many people simply do not have the intellectual gifts to be able to appreciate the
benefits of a higher education. For them entry into the trades is considered an equally
honorable and respected alternative to becoming a Herr Doktor and European society accepts
a skilled tradesman as being just as worthy of respect as the University graduate is in
his academic field. Only in politically correct America have we been deceived into the
wrong-headed belief that unless one has a college degree, one is essentially a failure in
life. Unhappily, this "politically correct" view is supported and
maintained by American minority group members, who have been equally sucked into this
vortex of intellectually dishonest deception--a fact that makes it awkward (see
"awkward", read "no backbone") for American majority liberals to do
anything other than further this frustrating deceit by spinelessly supporting the
distorted social philosophy behind it.
The practical result of this is that all American parents
now are forced to face the fact that each of their children absolutely MUST have a college
education (a proposition that is good for no one in our society other than the financial
lending institutions, who doubtlessly regard this fact as a heaven-sent boon, and all the
other thousands of commercial organisations which provide educational consumer products)
and a financial liability that increasingly grows into the impossible and unaffordable
region of hundreds of thousands of dollars per child.
Factor this unhappy reality into the formula that also subjugates all children to the
dictates of an economy that massively brainwashes children to become slavishly addicted to
expensive high-tech and reality distorting amusements (video & computer games, etc.,
etc.), thereby compelling parents to become co-dependents in the process by providing
their children with everything the other kids have, or face impossibly outrageous
behavioral reactivity, and you have a perfect script for mass parental madness. That is,
assuming that the parents have the slightest clue as to how the are being manipulated by
this very sinister economy we are all wasting our lives away supporting, for most of these
child-spawning, three-brain cell mothers and fathers are lucky if they are able to
recognise their own nether extremities from a hole in the front lawn.
Then too, there is the eventual joy of looking forward to being ignored by your offspring
when you are so old and feeble that you need to turn to them once in a while for help, or
solace. After a lifetime of thankless effort to provide the little buggers with the
ability to assume autonomous responsibility for their own actions in life, you can the
proudly face the prospect of a lifetime of ingratitude that has been stored up in their
little pinhead awarenesses, a vast reservoir of angst that invariably comes spilling out
at a time when you least need it.
As I remarked upon originally, probably the only good that comes from this whole
masochistic process of creating a "family" is that you will be so busy taking
care of the many messes their lives have created for you, that you won't be burdened by
the more esoteric of the truly kosmik considerations we humans face (such as "Why are
we here?", "What's the real purpose of human life?", or "Why do
we exist?"). Those of us who DO have more free time (un-prebooked by childcare
concerns) seem unhappily to be more generally afflicted with this preoccupation with
'life's ultimate meaning' (and of course this obsession is probably one vast joke anyway,
since the ultimate "answer" is likely to be that found in The
Hitch-hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: i.e. "There is no ultimate
meaning to life!"). In view of the large outlay required, in terms of support, care,
feeding, and the expenditure of exhaustive effort to assure their growth into something
other than delusional mass-murders and psychotic Lolitas, and the extremely
diminutive returns (some great--if brief--moments of drop-dead sex and the largely
narcissistic joys of creating another little "you"), the way I see it, anyone
who doesn't believe in pro-active birth control should trade their brain in for one that
uses slightly higher octane synaptical fluids.
Of course, there have been moments of doubt when I have reflected on these values and felt
as if (and not somewhat ironically) the polar opposite proposition is true--that
perhaps the only truly valid human activity on this planet is exactly that of
procreation. Fortunately (?), I have been able to stave off these all-too
"human" touchy-feely emotions. Truth be told, we need more people on this planet
as much as a dog needs more fleas. Especially in view of the fact that most of us end up
as little more than indentured economic slaves to the more soullessly manipulative and
economically voracious members of our society. Meanwhile, Darwin, and others who took a
more practical view of humanity's relationship to the natural world, appear to have had it
right, but that won't keep us all from merrily populating ourselves off the planet LONG
before this beautiful planet is eventually consumed by our own sun, when it turns
supernova in a few billion years.
Who was it that once remarked that "Marriage is the last major preserve of the
amateur"? No qualifications required for a union that is bound to produce more hungry
little mouths, other than that sneaky old biological itch that we all feel so often.
Lottsa luck, Mom...Dad. You'll need it........
January 2002 (illustration credit: Matt Wuerker)
