Sorry To Have To Tell You, But If You Can't Afford Kids, You Probably Shouldn't Have So Many

Someone said that if rats are placed in cramped quarters with limited resources, they'll start having babies, and that humans do the same thing. I generally agree, but I would point out that one major difference between humans and rats is that rats don't know how babies get made.

The problem began with cramming the poor into tiny spaces, but personal responsibility comes into play at some juncture. In a generation or two, you can no longer say that the poor don't grasp that if they are confined to their tiny existences, but they have more and more kids, their already meager resources will be spread thinner and thinner. 

I do believe that it's the responsibility of the rich to help the poor, but the poor can't completely exculpate themselves from making their situations worse by continuing to point the finger at others and say, "They did it!" In fact, this is what most of us are saying right now about the other side and how they treat the President. 

If I grow up in a one-parent household with three kids on a no-kid income and see the results of having to do that, it doesn't make me seem very responsible - or bright - to do the same thing myself.

I grew up poor. I've spent my entire life working for every single thing that I have. And I've made my own mistakes along the way, but repeating those that I watched my family make wasn't among them, for the most part, because I can learn from others' mistakes, too.

Just because you want 3 kids doesn't mean that you should have 3 kids if you can't afford to pay for them. I see this in my own community; some redneck living in a trailer whose walls you can see daylight through, with an $8000 four-wheeler in the front yard, beer cans everywhere, $12,000 worth of guns (this is not a joke; I know this family!) a beer can permanently - it seems - attached to their hands any time they're not at work - and that includes the ones 13 and older - and 6 kids, 5 of whom you and I support.

We live on an already-overcrowded planet whose resources we're using up at an unsustainable rate. You can bet the farm that the UHNWIs have already planned for natural (or unnatural, since we're causing it) population decline in the age of global warming, something which they publicly deny because they're invested in it, but which root-cause investments they're quietly but quickly divesting themselves of in order to grab a slice of the growing green economy. They're also planning for it, buying homes and properties in cooler, wetter climates at higher latitudes and altitudes (I beat them to it!), laughing all the way to the bank at people whose Fock Snooze-deluded priorities are keeping them behind in the stagnating fossil fuel/global warming-denial economies. 

They want the poor to turn on themselves and eat their own. The sooner, the better...for the wealthy. The sooner the poor are out of the picture, the sooner they won't be using resources that will then be available not just for a century, but because of the lowered demand, maybe for another millennium, giving the much, much smaller - and far wealthier - surviving population the chance to adapt to the new normal, a paradigm wherein automation and machine autonomy coupled with artificial intelligence will make labor obsolete. 

All that will happen on the backs of the poor. The more kids the poor have, the poorer they will remain, the more malleable they will be. They'll require money they have to borrow from the wealthy to buy food produced, transported, and sold by the wealthy. They'll need fuel for transportation and heating that they'll have to purchase from the wealthy. And they'll be killing each other to get it because there will be X number of people but only 1/2X resources to go around.

So, at some point, personal responsibility has to come home to roost with the poor, and they have to quit pointing the finger of blame at everyone else for the continuation of their poverty. It only takes one generation to fix it. Just one. Some guys will just have to face the fact that their family's line ends with them; that's the new normal. They're going to have to learn to adopt the same notion that Europeans and many Asians have had to adopt long ago, as well as many Americans: It takes a village to raise a child. And that means, 'even if it's not mine.'

I know what it's like to be poor. I also know what it's like to pull myself out of poverty using my own personal resources - determination, perspiration, and inspiration - because I had no others to fall back on. Poverty isn't a condition of race; it's a condition of the lack of money and opportunity, and poor Latinos, Asians, Whites, Blacks, and Native Americans all suffer it equally; it affects communities only as it affects individuals in a collective manner.

On The Origin of Gods

The original gods were created to explain the irrational fear of darkness and warn children from wandering too far from the illuminating flame of the family hearth. 

Intelligent children have always challenged the notion and went in search of the gods, only to return filled with knowledge and thus having no further need of them.

Is our future paved with the gravestones of our children?

Yesterday, 14 December 2012, twenty of our republic's children and seven of our adults lay down their lives while innocently pursuing their dreams. Days after a shooting spree in my former hometown of Portland, Oregon, we have yet another tragedy, made worse by the fact that it took lives so young and precious. Occurring only eleven days from our highest holiday, this event will likely darken the season's skies for their loved ones eternally. 

No sense can be made of this or the other heinous crimes committed by deranged gunmen, but the overarching cause behind them is like a flare warning us that it will be repeated until guns are out of reach of those who would use them for such as these.

What possesses a group of so-called responsible adults to claim after these tragedies that guns are not responsible for them? What illogic manifests that says no to reform of our gun laws? What would happen if this crowd lost children of their own in this manner? One could safely wager that they would want to find the guilty, but less certain is that they would search the one place they might find them: The mirror.

I wish this crime on no one, not even them. Yet, I hold them at least in part responsible. It's one thing to claim that only the deranged commit these murders, but it's yet another altogether to leave the weapons used available to the killers.

I fear that failure to pursue gun law reform leaves us little hope of a future not paved with the gravestones of our children.

If Not Now, When?

In the 1980s, Mothers Against Drunk Driving took on the establishment, and entrenched established ideas, to make our highways safer. They fought an uphill battle which they ultimately won.

We're faced with a dilemma: Do we allow an outdated constitutional right to trump public safety? The Founding Fathers could not foresee how our republic's education system has evolved into schools with hundreds or thousands of students, the rise of weaponry that will hold and fire hundreds of rounds per minute, or the foundation and continuance of an organization whose existence triumphs violence through its cryptic mission.

The NRA purports to uphold the Second Amendment in its honest intent, but the Founding Fathers would have come down on the side of What's Best for the Republic rather than an anachronistic idealism, it seems clear.

Yes, it will require vigorous debate. Yes, honest citizens should be allowed to keep and bear arms. But no, assault weapons have no place in the hands of teens, the deranged, pure criminals, or anyone whose right and role in our society doesn't demand their mindful ownership.

Haven't we learned our lesson just in this one year alone? I fear that if we haven't, we deserve what we've wrought.