So way back when, I wrote this entirely ridiculous essay about high school and high school shootings. Some blathering on about how the environment encourages the event, the explosion of unabated rage from someone who's obviously lost their mind. I mean, noone sane goes about blowing other people away, right? It's obvious that anybody who walks around picking people off like Ah-nuld in T1 is kinda looped.
And I still agree with that. But it's interesting to watch the proliferation of little events, little pimply-faced pipsqueaks wandering around blindly with a pistol cocked `cause they think they could pull it off, finish what Dylan and Eric started.
I bet one of you is lurking out there now, chatting on IRC with your other obnoxious, acne-prone friends. Maybe you prattle on about white supremacy, maybe you sit and talk about the Clash and Minor Threat. Maybe you skulk around in graveyards, like I used to do, or try to look tough standing on street corners smoking clove cigarettes. You can't imagine that anyone understands. Not the straights walking by, in their pre- distressed jeans and tucked-in t-shirts. Not the women toting babies, not the glossy-haired pep squad. Nobody gets you. But they hate you. You think they do. You make them stare, you want it but you don't. You're angry. You're too smart, too quick. You hear and you see. Maybe someone talks to you, maybe the silence is deafening. Maybe the roar is too loud.
Why not? Why not do it? Why not end it all, go out and do something? I'll tell you why not.
For one, it's passé. You might think you'll get headlines, but what is five minutes in today's retarded media worth? You're only newsworthy because of our society's odd fixation with some fictional sort of childhood innocence. Eventually, we'll get used to it - our concern has already started to fade. But in the meantime, you'll get to have your most awful high school portrait plastered on the supermarket newsstand for every breeding cow carting two grungy brats to finger as she hauls off her brood and their packaged prey. Your name will go on some list in some college academics office. You might make a foot note in a psychology study. Ooooh. What fucking fame.
Puh-leeze. School violence is nothing new. Violence pervades our culture, anger is a natural human emotion. We punish each other and we reward each other. Sometimes you're heaped more of one than the other. We didn't shoot each other before guns, but we hardly blink when someone is blown away now.
Shooting up your school won't make you popular. It won't win you any friends. You'll still be the target of people's ridicule, but instead of it being random and pointless, it will be carefully targeted and much more vicious. They won't just not care about you, they will genuinely hate you.
Dead or alive, hundreds - maybe thousands - of people will hate you. Maybe you don't believe in God or in Heaven or Hell, but if you have any sort of brain in your head, you've considered religion. There is a chance. If you're even remotely wrong, you're terribly screwed. No religion advocates doing what you've just done. You're barely prepared to support yourself (else you'd simply get off your ass and get the hell out of whereever you are), are you really ready to face whatever punishment there is by whatever powers there be? Ouch. I wouldn't even go for that one.
And you plan on dying, don't you? Going out in a blaze of glory. Sure. Are you positive you can pull the trigger? And what happens if you miss that big oaf of a jock, and he knocks away your weapon, defeats you like you fear he could? But even if he doesn't, even if you shoot him dead-bang, there are more like him. And if you don't kill yourself nice and proper, you'll meet them in prison.
If you think being teased in gym is bad, try a max-security prison shower. Or just think about prison, in general. You hate high school so much you want to spend the rest of your life in a cage much smaller and more deadly even than that? You really are a fucking moron.
The idea that blowing away your problems will solve them is simply ludicrous. I wasn't Ms. Popularity in high school - that upper echelon was reserved for cheerleaders and homecoming queens. I was a jock, and a science geek, certainly someone's target. And getting teased made me angry, oh so angry. But to let those grinning idiots be right about me? They thought I was worthless - was stopping their petty descent into trailer park luxury really worth the rest of my life? Hardly.
My god, it's like someone slipped a pregnancy mickey into the water around here these days. I suppose it is a function of age -- my friends are old enough to have been married a few years now, and married people tend to... reproduce -- but it's still damned frightening how bloody serious we get about the whole business.
I say this, of course, as a single woman getting ready to be 'over' 25, which just a few years ago would have sounded ancient. Perhaps I am just bitter. But I shall prattle on, nonetheless.
Twenty-five is the average age -- or so CNN tells me -- at which women have their first child. At 25, my mother had been married several years and I wasn't far away. Most of my friends have parents of roughly the same age, some a few years older, some younger. I have friends of 25 who have a child, some more than one. So the statistic seems reasonable. Most of my contemporaries -- the straight ones anyway -- have mates of serious standing. Many of them seem to plan to raise little ones. Though I suppose I have something of the same relationship, it's a little different, difficult.
Because I'm not sure we should all be having children. Certainly not two, or three. We don't have the time, we're treating them poorly and, let's face it -- a good portion of our number aren't fit to raise a hamster, much less a child.
Perhaps I'd be compentant, perhaps I wouldn't. But that not withstanding, I do know a few things.
I know that I am selfish -- I have a demanding career that I thoroughly enjoy. I would not relish (nor would my coworkers or boss enjoy) having to leave a project meeting early because little Timmy had a toothache. I would have to either cut my hours or get a sitter -- pulling an all-nighter to get a deal-maker out the door would be nigh upon impossible. I don't have a house-husband or stay-at-home wife, someone with a regular job that could be counted upon to uphold the regular schedule that children require. I certainly don't have that kind of life right now.
I don't know about you, but I think the adage 'if you're going to do something, do it well' should apply especially to children and career. These are supposedly the hallmarks of your life, the things you work hardest for. Why put yourself in a position where you must choose one or the other? In the simplest rational part of my mind, it seems obvious that children or career is, for the most part, an either/or decision -- it's incredibly difficult to have both.
And before all the single mothers and fathers get their drawers all in a wad, I didn't imply in the least that it is an impossible task to raise a child and succeed at a trade. With sacrifice and selflessness, I've seen it done. But given the choice, can you honestly say you'd recommend it?
That aside, I see more and more people opting to go the tough route, to try to have it all. For what?
Increasingly, both parents work full-time jobs, simply to cover the bills. With a baby on the way, Mom at least must take some time off -- many health-care plans allow for three months, some as few as one. Some mothers-to-be are lucky, with paid maternity leave. For others, household income is slashed drastically. Careful planning can mitigate financial difficulty, but between preparing for the new arrival and paying all the doctor bills, it's easy to amass debt.
If debt is not an issue, if Dad's income is solid and sufficient, count yourself as one of the special few. For most, the added cost of diapers and college tuition means Mommy heads back to work as soon as little Sprout can be weaned.
The state of childcare -- at least for the relatively affluent -- is pretty good. But most parents aren't relatively affluent, and the time, money, and influence that is required for individualized private daycare is often far out of reach. The cost of a year of minimal work-week childcare is roughly equal to the year's take-home pay from any minimum wage job in any city in the United States.
I consider myself divorced from that kind of reality. I knew nothing of it in the small, cloistered Southern town I grew up in. I really can't imagine having to choose between clothing and food, childcare and welfare.
But that is not the kind of family planning I intend to address here. It is neither a dismissal nor a marginalization, simply an admission that I have no relevant experience with which to form an opinion. I'd like to think, in an ideal world, that only those equipped to provide for progeny would produce them, but that tiptoes rather discomfortingly towards a slide that ends in virtual genocide, and practically ignores all that social science has learned about environmental influence and the insistant opression of the weak by the strong. I've attempted to wrangle with this topic before, and find myself re-reading whatever I've said with the sort of wry knowledge that I sound like I'm repeating Johnathon Swift. Survival of the fittest is a pretty well proven biological process, but I do realize that it is part of the human experience to at least put a pleasant facade around it.
So I address not that which I do not know, but that which I do. Yes, this is you, yuppie-ite with your Saturn station-wagon and SUV-brand stroller. Working mom who can't "do weekends" or leave work any later than 5.
I see babies in the office, children playing on the carpet as Mom finishes her filing. Sure, my dad took me to work a time or two, but always as a treat, a special outing. He didn't leave me sitting there for hours at a time, or let me wander around a normally child-free zone, sticking my grubby paws into truly adult business.
I see parents with infants toiling away into the wee hours of the morning. Even when Mom is on maternity leave and home with the baby full-time, post-partum isn't exactly the best moment to leave her completely alone, with a sometimes nerve-wracking new addition. I fully support paternity leave for this very reason, though with some caveats that seem to distinctly displease many of the working parents I am aquiainted with.
More discouraging than the workaholic parent, I also see an entire crop of accessory children -- kids who are brought out and paraded around in perfect little outfits, expected to perform like tiny actors. Beauty queens and Buster Browns, I see them everywhere. The little girl whose mother admonished her severely for wanting to join a group of other children who were stomping in a puddle: "Little girls don't play in the mud. It's dirty." The child whose mother throws elaborate parties in his honor, invites people who are complete strangers to the kid, and then punishes the toddler for shying away from the commotion.
It is often that I see the very same children acting like... well, children. Undisciplined children, spoiled children. I don't pretend in the least to understand what it takes to properly raise a child, but I do know what is generally socially permissable behavior for most stages of human development. And even with a broad range of acceptability, I've seen more than a few out-of-control tots with parents that not only ignore but blithely excuse and occasionally encourage inappropriate and even dangerous actions.
Perhaps it is unpleasant to discipline a child, this thing you love and revere more than life itself. But it seems rather apparent to me -- and to the pseudoscience of child psychology -- that the best strategy for molding a positive and balanced person is equal parts attention and discipline, firmness and flexibility. You cannot shape them into miniature likenesses, but you must give them the tools and the framework to sculpt their own image. It frightens me to imagine the results of the dichotimous message these children receive -- you belong to me, but I do not accept the responsibility for your actions, or for your existence.
And all of these things, all of these things I see that step lightly towards the nastiness we call neglect, seem to center easily around that single ideal -- personal responsibility. We have claimed for ourselves the responsibility for our own reproductive actions. Abortion, once considered illegal and entirely immoral, has slowly crept at least into the quiet conversations among girlfriends. We may not welcome making the choice, but we gratefully (and sometimes naively) take for granted the fact that we have it. Contraception -- whether it is simply wholesale distribution of such or the progression of the science that makes it -- has stepped forward in ways that let us enjoy the ability to plan our families carefully, if we so choose.
In the same way we have wrested control of our biology, we have attempted to tame the earth and regulate our experience with it. As in all things scientific, we base our actions on demand and supply, on the close examination of the thing before us. We have exploded into new cities, overcome many of the difficulties of global communication, and begun to really see a greater picture of the state of the world.
We have the ability to see all of this, the tools to affect it, and yet we do nothing. We exist couched in our smugness over the recent success of our scramble-to-the-top, ignore-those-at-the-bottom capitalism and blithely assume that the relative good times we've enjoyed will continue simply because we are accustomed to them.
It is easy to ignore the AIDS crisis in Africa -- it is so far away, in a world so different from our own. Overcrowding in India -- until hundreds of people died, squashed in inadequate clapboard high-rises -- we knew nothing of it. We celebrate the ability to instantly know of these events, yet our government sits on high, glibly playing games with the Chinese and Taiwan, or dabbling in the Middle East. We pretend that we are capable of directing the world's actions, yet we do nothing to divert ourselves from the same kind of path. In regards to religion and AIDS education and border expansion, the cause is at least attended to. We have pundits and researchers and New York Times articles about those kinds of things. But population control? That's for fascists. We are creating one generation after another, each larger and less grounded than the one before it, but any discussion of what is ultimately the reality of our limited physical resources is immediately dismissed as un-American, anti-family.
What is so incredibly un-American about wanting to maintain the ability to function as a society? Packing herds of undisciplined status-symbol offspring into institutionalized learning facilities, then shuffling them off to dreary job markets, in an environment that is quickly being outstripped by its occupants... that doesn't particularly sound like a dreamy future.
If we want small class sizes and well-adjusted children, we have to take personal responsibility for creating that. There is no other way.
Perhaps what I call responsibility seems like draconian reproductive politics. It is, in a way. I don't support rewarding sterilization or limiting birthrates, but I do put forth rather candidly that I think population growth desperately needs slowing. And I will easily admit that I target a particular population -- my own -- with which to begin the cutbacks.
I think everyone should have to give a little. Cautiously, I advocate easier dispensation of birth control, and the recent approval of RU-486 and the commonly- known 'morning after pill'. I quickly dismiss Orwellian ideas of sterilization and forced infertility, but I do believe that birth control and other family planning options should be covered by all forms of medical insurance, including state and federal assistance programs. Abortion, regardless of economic standing, should be an option for any woman or family who is dealing with an unplanned pregnancy.
If abortion is a morally reprehensible option for you, then simply do not choose to have one -- to deny others the right goes against Roe v. Wade and the federal decision that gave another tiny chunk of reproductive control to women.
It sounds harsh to consider the right to abortion only a tiny fraction of control, to say that women really have very little influence over their own bodies, but it is very true indeed. Through a coarse web of medical establishment and government regulation, a fertile woman is almost entirely at the whim of big business (male) puppeteers.
Drug companies knew about estrogen and progesterone therapies (eventually known as birth control pills) long before they were ever introduced into FDA testing. European women had early, easy access to contraception, with no catastrophic results, no birth defects or gynecological cancers. The FDA withheld approval for years, citing various concerns about side effects and allergic reactions, all the while never considering (or admitting) that the risks of pregnancy -- even in a healthy, prepared female -- far outstripped those of a hormone regimen. Once NOW and the women's rights movement finally shoved the drug industry into action, the progress was slow at best. Public interest might have been there, but the public in question was a largely disenfranchised population of young women and wives, without the clout and cash to really turn heads their direction. Slowly, we have advanced, from a world of vacuum-extraction abortions and super-powered pills to a more responsible, safer alternative.
But where are we now?
Male contraceptive therapies, though clearly considered feasible by more than one abstract I've burrowed through, don't seem to attract much in the way of funding. One dismissive drug executive glibly explained to the NYTimes why men wouldn't be interested in the male pill: it produced 'discomforting' side effects, like water retention, mild to moderate cramping, headaches and nausea. He failed to mention, of course, that the frequency and intensity of the symptoms was nearly identical to that of a large number of commonly-prescribed female oral contraceptives.
Another hurdle the chirpy exec explained was that of cost. The male pill, he proffered, would be expensive, several hundred dollars a year. I did the math -- 12 months of pill packs from the local Planned Parenthood ($12 apiece at the cheapest) [$144], a couple trips to the gynecologist to get the scrip and adjust the dosage [$50-$100 each, median $75], and you're easily there. Count in the added expense of all those 'feminine supplies' (which is another rant entirely), and you're easily hitting $500 a year, just for general maintence of reproductive responsibility. In the event of pregnancy, choosing abortion will cost anywhere from $300-$1000, and actually having the child much, much more.
It is expected that women will be willing to absorb these costs, no matter the economic situation and often unassisted by the insurance she is lucky enough to enjoy -- but it is considered the height of responsibility for a man to bring along a 50-cent jimmy and roll it on. How skewed is that?
The expense alone is a daunting opponent. Birth control should be every bit as affordable and available as antibiotics, immunizations, and prozac. We've justified medically manipulating a variety of human conditions, and the only difference here is that the 'condition' is one we regard with some sort of eerie reverence.
Get over it, already. The whole moral argument gives way in the face of environmental logic. We know so many things about carrying capacity and the psychology of societies that we cannot but come to the conclusion that if we continue to breed at the present rate globally, we will eventually outstrip our home planet and succumb to some nasty disaster or another.
We must realize that faith in Gods or memes notwithstanding, we should pursue most every viable avenue (save those that lead to certain, albeit different, scenerios of ruin such as social chaos, opression, or the loss of certain inalienable rights) to limit our growth until such a time as technology grants us a brighter future.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Reproduce Responsibly... that should be our new national slogan.
To those in the religious right -- you cheerfully sign on to research the cure for cancer, the solution to CF... to cure the diseases that the very same God who created the life abortion takes also created. Has is not been part of his plan, in the past, to require sacrifices of his disciples? It has been argued that the Covenant with Noah after the flood guaranteed safety from God's Wrath, but that is a vague translation at best. We credit God with so many miracles, and also justify many sorrows as works of His hand, for the greater good. But you cannot have it both ways. If God controls all things, and has a greater plan for all things, can you certainly say that He doesn't intend a leukemia-stricken five-year-old rejoin him in Heaven for some greater task? Can you not logically assume that our knowledge of population mechanics means that the smart God that we know gave us weak hearts and cardiovascular disease and cancer so that we wouldn't ruin the playground he gave us by living practically forever?
If we are obliged to accept this gift of life, don't we also have to accept the one of death? How can He care about one but not the other? I challenge you to be true to your faith, and obey God's will in all things. Senator Helms, please immediately cease all medical treatment -- your God is calling you home.
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