Imagine you were a crazy person who actually believes all the statistics that are collected, as well as books written by alarmist idiots (rich alarmist idiots, mind you) like Paul Ehrlich are G-d's holy writ, handed down from mount infallible to your tiny little mind.
And imagine this is around the fifties, and you look around all these families with four and five kids a piece, and you think this means there is a population bomb and ahrgle bargle, gasoline gargle, you're all going to diiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiie when the population bomb goes off and reeeeeeeeeee!
You could stand at the corner and scream non stop that people should stop having kids, but that wouldn't work. At best people would point and laugh. At worse they would give you the much deserved beating of a lifetime.
Or, if you are the type of learned idiot, who has connections, you could start ensconcing yourself in institutions and, more importantly, the highly centralized centers of communication and entertainment media in this country, and from there slowly and gently -- shall we say painlessly -- poison the minds of the young so that they will OF COURSE decide not to have children. Because they're "smart" and "educated" and, of course "of a higher class."
Humans being social apes, you can sell almost anything to them as higher group social signaling. I mean, look at the things that have been sold to humans as denoting higher social class, from pallor so white it required the taking of small dosages of arsenic, to wearing miniature ships on your head (that had to hurt) to the bizarrely convoluted garments of various eras, to living in a big ol' drafty palace where all the food arrived cold, and where you had to bankrupt yourself and your estates to remain, to the twiggy-thinness of the eighties, to sterilizing yourself and destroying your future .... today.
And that's how a childless lifestyle, and frankly voluntary extinction was sold.
Oh, they tried the direct method too. Showing pictures of mismanaged third world countries and assuring you that's where we'd be without serious population control; or showing you pictures of children in Africa, starved by their kleptocrat rulers and pretending that this is the result of your having enough to eat and having children.
Somehow it never worked or never very well. Like convincing people "rationally" that we were running out of fossil fuels.
In fact, like the "climate crisis" they can only terrify the extremely neurotic, the borderline autistic, and people so smart that in everyday lives they function like complete idiots, and can be convinced of everything that someone sells with enough gusto. I.e. no matter how much they scream and stomp, only a small portion of the population falls for it.
The rest continue to live in a sane way and know that fossil fuel is not scarce. The exploration and sale of it is being strangled in its crib by the malevolent idiots in power. Like food distribution in Africa.
Because when things are presented frontally people have defenses against the bloody stupid. Or at least most people do.
There are signs. Like, when I was in high school they gave us the contracts in which we promised -- pinky swear -- to never have children in 11th grade. By my kids' generation they were presenting it in the seventh, trying to get in below the age of even mild reason.
Of course those don't work, even when you get kids to sign them because they want good grades. Because kids aren't stupid, and at some gut level you know contracts signed under duress aren't valid.
Ah, but then there is the slow poison, and the intimations of social signaling.
So... We've been watching a lot of old mysteries/thriller series in the evening. By "we've been watching" you should as always understand that what this means is that Dan is watching them, because this is his activity of choice when his brain is fried from real work, and I'm doing the next day's blog (as you can tell from time of posting, not recently, but that's because of sleep disturbances. Meds are being adjusted.) I get bits here and there, between work, enough to get the gist. I mean, these are not high-demand shows (no tv show is, really. Colombo, maybe, but how long ago was that?)
Because my brain is divided and squirreling on other stuff, back and forth, it took a while to sink in, and in fact I didn't see it at all. Dan did. And then I reviewed it through my head and went "Oh. Oooooooh."
Two days ago, early morning, as I was getting dressed, Dan said, "You do realize that these shows, none of the "aspirational" married couples have children? Even the happily married ones have a dog or a cat, and if asked about children laugh and say it's not for them. The only children are either conceived by single women in abusive relationships, or are the children of divorced mothers who obviously had bad marriages? Children are always associated with poverty and abuse."
I reviewed it my head, and yep. It is exactly like that. Plus, mind you, the wife and the husband usually both work, the husband in some sort of corporate or high stress career and the wife makes JUST as much, and her job is just as vital, but the wife works at some artsy fartsy field, from outright art to catering, to custom cakes, or whatever. But she's massively successful -- everyone of them is -- and makes a lot of money, and they both go out to eat or get take out, or cook GOURMET meals all the time, and dress in the dernier crie of fashion, and look down on the poor dumb peasants who don't live like them.
Upper class. Totally unrealistic, bizarrely self involved upper class.
Yes, yes, I know. You're all laughing at me now, "TV shows are unrealistic, news at 11."
But that's not the point. The point is that they're all unrealistic in the exact same way. Like, they're all reading from the same song book and only one song will be allowed, sung in perfect harmony.
I'm not proposing there is a conspiracy -- though heaven knows, there might be, as recently it came out there's yet another incarnation of the journolist, this time with the rabid left and the Never Trumper "right" (they must be so proud to be included! I hope they realize they're still on the elimination list, and ahead of us at that) deciding how to report things to make it so that Potatus can fake a win in November. (Selling their country for a mess of attaboys. Pottage at least you can eat.) -- but a prospiracy. These people who control what you see are hired and promoted by the media-news-entertainment-complex because they are either true believers or so ambitious they'll sell their grandmother to an Havana brothel for a crust of bread, or a bit of social approval.
I.e. they're not pushing this nonsense because they want to save the world -- though some of them are probably stupid or smart enough to (the extremes really touch in this case) -- but because they really believe these things they put in fiction. It couldn't -- wouldn't -- be so pervasive if they hadn't internalized it.
And the problem is that the serving of poison in small measures works, where screaming at people won't work.
It has been established that our Neolithic brains don't process very well the idea that what we see on the screen isn't real. And we internalize a lot of it as having happened to us, or as being our real social circle.
So, for instance, we tend to include characters of frequently watched sitcoms in our count of people we see every day. And we will describe events and things we saw on TV as having happened to us. (Why I don't hold against Hillary describing disembarking in Sarajevo in a hail of bullets. And as for FJB his dementia has scrambled his brain, and he was always a filthy liar, but seriously, at this point the barrier really is gone in his mind, and he probably really believes Ol' Uncle Bosie as eaten by cannibals, because he saw it in some show in the forties.)
And so, insensibly, our young people are internalizing that having children means being very poor the rest of their lives, or getting divorced. And women are internalizing that wanting children means they're abused.
Children are still happening. Weirdly, this means they're happening more concentrated. I.e. fewer families have children, but those that do have large families. Because they are stubborn and mullish enough to buck the trend. Which also means the future presents itself with four feet stuck in the ground and screaming "you can't make me."
But even those of us who raised children (granted my body didn't allow us many) are going to lose much of the next generation to this subtle propaganda.
Yes, many of us said the reason that the birth rate is falling is not that the new generation is deprived compared to their distant ancestors. But then we're not in the stone age, and if you try to raise ten children in a grass hut in the middle of the field, social services will come and take them away. However, and more importantly, young people all have, at the back of their heads, the certainty that if they have children their lives are over.
How many times have you seen the "studies" on things like raising a child to 18 is a quarter million or a half a million dollars? We were enormously flattered by these when we were raising ours. Because heaven knows, you feel pinched and exhausted (when they're toddlers) and you feel like at least you're saving that much. But is it true? Is it ever true? I know that we didn't make enough to pour that much into each kid. No way. It would be more than 10k per kid per year, and you'd have to count "lost wages" if I were in a well-paying job, instead of staying home and trying to be published in that. And you'd have to not count all the money I saved by buying used furniture and refinishing, buying the ingredients and making food, buying thrift store clothing, etc.
Now, yeah, the kids did cost time, and I was in one of those artsy-fartsy jobs that don't pay for decades. Eventually they might (or might never) but they don't pay much while you're breaking in.
And yes, we were very poor for a long time, but honestly? We'd have been even without the kids. Maybe poorer, because the kids counted as our entertainment system for a long time. (No, seriously. Now I'm not saying everyone has enormously amusing children, but we did.)
But the studies, the talk, the shows, all assure young people their lives will be over if they have even one or two kids.
I didn't realize this, until one of you said it, but the lifestyle being sold as aspirational is "College student with money." The marriage is just like living together in college, but both of you are making pots of money. And this is sold as what everyone should be doing.
Now-- Does that lifestyle sound great? Sure. Though Dan and I never partied as college students (since -- back when this was possible -- both of us did college very cheaply by keeping high grades) but we did have our first six years of marriage as a sort of poor-man's version of this. And when I was working as a high-rent version of this.
The thing is it's not as fun as you think. The work in your twenties if you are in a high-demand, high-pay position (which wasn't artsy-fartsy for me, more soul killing) is brutal because everyone expects you to do 12 hours, no paid overtime. So the eating out, the clothes, etc? Well, we did it, because we had no time to do anything else. And yeah, we had a group of friends who were like us, and we went to comedy clubs and music shows, and movies with them. But I was usually too exhausted to enjoy any of it. And at the end of the year, we had almost no money left.
More importantly, and left out of these shows which shows people in their forties living this lifestyle: it wears out. It palls.
The subtle poison won't sell itself for more than a generation. Because not having kids is an ugly lifestyle as you age. Yes, I know. There are social services and charitable organizations. Do you want to count on them as you age?
We're not seriously impaired yet. In some things, we are very much like people in their thirties, and on the good days I still do that level of work, no problems. But Dan's knees have given out (we're finally trying to get back on track on the replacement that the lockdowns derailed) and in physical work, I do about half what I think is my normal rate, so things take forever. (I have a list. From yard work, to painting, to tuck pointing, but it will probably take the whole summer, instead of a couple of weeks.)
But there are days, and there are times, already, that if we couldn't call on one of the sons to help me take a piece of furniture downstairs, or to come help when we tried to bring an exercise machine in ourselves, and Dan fell and literally can't get up, and I don't know if he broke something. (Seriously. That was terrifying, because the treadmill was across our door, and he was outside. I had to lock the cats, then go around to even see if it looked like he broke something -- he hadn't --) Without the kid dropping everything and coming over to lend a hand (thank heavens he works from home) we'd have had to call the fire department and the ambulance and wait.
I'm not going to say we're in big trouble yet. We always did stupid things. We're not old enough to be in bad trouble. But we can see old age from where we are and the vulnerabilities and dangers of it.
Now, I'm the last person to rag on anyone who for good and sufficient reason chose not to have kids. (And good and sufficient reason includes "because no.") Or anyone who tried to have kids and couldn't. We were almost in that boat. And though I got married in my early twenties, I was an old maid by village standards, and I am also not going to rag on anyone who never found anyone to marry or stay married to.
However, it's not a dream lifestyle where you get to be a college student with money forever, as the shows sell it. Eventually old age comes to us all. And while having children is not a guarantee of having some help, (we're really very lucky that for now sons are within driving distance and one close-ish) it is more likely than if you don't.
Sacrifices to raise them? I guess??? Though it's hard to pinpoint exactly. I lost years of life and tons of hair over their schooling, but that was mostly because I was stupid and thought I couldn't homeschool.
Still, their sales job, the subtle poison of "no children is better" is working. And though even government shills and some establishment lunatics are waking up and realizing that the "overpopulation" let alone the "population bomb" were likely always snow jobs, and the correction has been disastrous, they're having trouble turning the boat around.
Partly because the poison continues, and is out there in re-runs too. And partly because when you establish that kind of social signaling in the culture "children are low class" it's really hard to reverse. China, who, being China, forced it at first, now can't overcome the "one child is plenty" expectation of the culture. And this is China, who if you remember, we were assured was in irreversible population explosion, such that if there was a line of Chinese jumping off a cliff, more would be born in line so it would never run out.
The rest of us...
The invasion over the border is giving people the idea the rest of the world is overpopulated for sure. But like high prices giving the idea that fossil fuels are scarce, this is not true. None of it is true.
Not happy with making our children into useless pensioners, we're stealing the third world's children to do the same to them. In their wake are left empty countries who can't do anything, because the young people have left. Not quite fully visible yet, because as in most first waves of migration, it's mostly young males. The females are left behind for now, as old-maids and functional widows even if married. And some of the older people are thirty and forty. But in ten years it will be obvious.
(BTW I never understood this part of the population bomb gospel. Mostly it wanted the first world to stop reproducing. But didn't they realize that just meant we'd import people, and the total would be more or less the same? I did by 35. I wrote that story. Couldn't sell it of course. I'm now amazed I was stupid enough to think I could.)
Because this fall in population is worldwide. Partly because the convincing by entertainment affects the entire world. Everyone watches American and English shows. Our left never understands that.
The more far-seeing population experts are now screaming about a catastrophic population drop, and extinction level event.
It's funny I could see this twenty five years ago, when they thought I was crazy and tried to shout me down. Yeah, I know, Cassandra didn't get half the beating she deserved.
Is it early enough to reverse it? Who knows? How low can we go before we can't hold a technological civilization? Who knows?
It's stupid. It's bizarre. The entire species was convinced to commit slow suicide. Still is being.
Not by sudden catastrophe, not by preaching and raving on the street corners, but by slow dripping poison, convincing us that the next generation was just too much trouble and too expensive, and that if we didn't give them life, we could live forever, young and golden in the isle of the blest.
I have no counter to this, except that we need to write stories of families, stories of happy parenthood. And we need to be open enough to explain how having kids was worth it -- probably the biggest challenge and the best experience we ever had -- and how humanity is worth it and worth investing in.
Oh, and how no one is perfect, childless or parent, and we're all broken and do the best we can. And that's the best we can hope for.
We need to believe and invest in life. Either creating it or adopting it and guiding it. (And I don't mean legally. We've covered that.)
I don't know about you, but I'm human and I'm for the humans. I don't care if beavers, or lobsters, or insects are better.
I'm #teamhuman all the way. #teamhuman is worth it.
It might be too late. It might be hopeless. But grandma always said "While there's life, there's hope."
Go and work for Team Human. Go work for the future. Hug a young 'un today and tell them they're worth it.
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