Can we agree that essentially we are all heading toward the same direction here? I guess as a gay man, I'm somewhat less horrified because I have nobody to pass this world on to? At the same time, can't I laugh, most boisterously, at the same people who belittled me for not having kids? Yes, these are the same people that poisoned their own children's' futures!
10 comments:
I am childfree, too, absolutely by choice. I'm not maternal, but I also never thougth there was going to be much of a world to hand on. Sadly it seems I was right (35 eyars ago!)
or even thought
Ive been meaning to pop in for ages but I keep getting distracted by vincent.
I was against having shildren but I got all fuzzy in middle age and popped a couple out most carelessly.
sorry.
LOL! Cathy, that reminds me of this scene from Monty Python's 'The Meaning of Life.'
[A northern street. Dad is marching home. We see his house. A stork
flies above it, and drops a baby down the chimney.]
Dad: Oh bloody hell.
[Inside the house. A pregnant woman is at the sink. With
a cry a new-born baby, complete with umbilical cord,
drops from between her legs onto the floor.]
Mother: "Get that would you, Deirdre..."
Girl: "All right, Mum."
[The girl takes the baby. Mum carries on.]
Way to go, Cathy! So good to see you here. And I understand all about those D'Onofrio-induced distractions . . .
I'm sure people throughout various stages in history have had the same attitude as many of us (myself, included): that bringing another generation of humanity onto this planet may not be such a good idea.
On the UPSIDE: the great thing about HAVING kids and bringing them into this world, with all its problems, is that one of your own could end up SOLVING one of those many problems, or at least, being PART of the solution.
Fingers crossed . . .
I too followed the lemmings into the sea and popped out 2 children. For those of you who have met my offspring, I hope you will agree that I have done the best I could to raise good people. My younger son is capable of solving peace in the middle east, or using his genius to create a new type of cheaper drug that won't blow up in the lab.
That said, I must say that this current election appears to offer a glimmer of the one thing this country has sorely missed for ages. There appears to be a light at the end of the tunnel and a glimmer of hope for change. That said, the alternative is that the little light is the coming of the rapture, in which case we are all quite fucked.
Yes, my 7 year old daughter has already started saving the world.
she gave me a list of things that can be recyled practically as soon as she had learned the alphabet and she recently pushed me into the path of an oncoming car besause I almost stepped on a snail. If she sees ants she feeds them and even at the age of three she shared her yoghurt with a beetle she found in the garden.
My ten year old daughter is reading Anne Frank's Diary and wants me to explain how a madman like Hitler got so many people to follow him...HELP!
I'm a "would be breeder" but my wife's on such severe meds for her migraines, that anything which came out would wind up looking wackier than Rep. Kucinich (then again, he's doing alright for himself, by the looks of things), so while I want and intended to have children, I always looked on the idea of inheritance in a broader, more Daoist or Process Philosophy way.
Think about the refugee literati in Fahrenheit 451 (If you don't know it, shame on you, read it, its only the greatest piece of American fiction and societal commentary in the last 100 years!)- passing on both knowledge and the art of thinking to the other exiles. We have all inherited much from the brave people before us who dared to speak of the emperor's nudity instead of joining in the throngs which praised his wonderful new suit. We are here able to talk about this because brave men and women put this country and its ideals of free speech, free thought, etc., ahead of their own personal interests. We all have a role in perpetuating and passing these on.
Cathy, hooray, you're an outstanding parent to have produced such an offspring.
It really isn't too hard though... just the number of people in the US who vote explains it. Hitler never got a true MAJORITY of the voting populace of Germany to vote for him, he got a plurality of the votes cast.
The answer is simply this: All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.
The Lutheran pastor Reinhold Niebur applied and explained this to Hitler very aptly, in words which are frighteningly applicable to us today as the majority of the populace lets all sorts of racial profiling happen in the name of "national security" or "securing our borders" because it doesn't seem to affect them:
"In Germany, they came first for the communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists but I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant. Then they came for me, and by that time nobody was left to speak up."
Martin Niemoeller
-Excerpt, Speech; 1946
If I go on further, I'll have to blog about this, and since my blogger blog is just about recycling old clothes into rugs (my rant blog is listig.multiply.com)...
"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."
Words to live by . . . and we all need to be reminded of them from time to time . . .
Indeed... though the matter of attribution is uncertain, the truth of them is not.
Look at any "mass evil"- slavery, discrimination, Hitler, Stalin, etc., and you'll find it was true.
Neville Chamberlain and James Carter were doubtless fine fellows morally, but their ineffectual actions allowed great suffering and evil. (Yes, I know Herr Carter is still alive, but I adopted the past tense to for ease of reading and because I'm speaking of their ineffectual attempts to contain evil by appeasement while leaders of their country.)
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