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Even Ben Wattenberg has finally found something that worries him. The pop economist once found cheer amid the gloom; remember The Good News is that the Bad News is Wrong?
Now, however, he is promoting a new book, The Birth Dearth. He says we face a big problem. Americans aren't building babies as fast as we once did. If this trend continues, we'll run out of fast-food clerks, expendable soldiers and, most important, customers for the products of American industry.
Clearly, this is a threat to our cherished way of life. So how do we encourage more people to have bigger families?
We could start by eliminating the negative connotations
of the word family.
As it is, family is a synonym
for cheap and tasteless, as with restaurants that promote
family fare.
Or it means boring and preachy, as in
a movie for family audiences.
It sounds ominous and
sinister when you mention the Five Families of New
York.
Even when you're talking about the normal notion of
family, families have acquired an evil reputation. Always
you see articles which announce Study demonstrates that
day-care centers are vastly better places for children than
homes and neighborhoods.
Families, judging by what you
read, are no more than places for children to be abused and
neglected.
The mother-of-the-year and the father-of-the-year are never normal people who merely tend to their own children, doing as best as they can. They're always people with dynamic careers and extensive involvement in community activities -- in short, people too busy to spend time with their own children. And that is what we honor in this country as exemplars of parenthood.
Along the way, we could make the pro-family
political forces adopt another name.
I like families. I have one, I came from one, I think families are wonderful and important.
But I'm not about to say I'm pro-family
when
being pro-family
means that you're a lobotomy victim
anxiously awaiting Oral Roberts' resurrection or that
you're a zealous participant in the jihad against teaching
science and literature in schools.
We also need to remove the social stigma attached to women who stay home and raise families. Since no paycheck is attached to that activity, there is a widespread myth that what they do isn't important.
A woman who devotes herself to a career allows some faceless corporation to tell her how to dress, when to get up in the morning, how to sit at her desk, when to eat lunch, etc. But when she condescends to talk to a stay-at-home mother, she somehow manages to argue that she is liberated and the mother, who controls a great deal more of her own life, is oppressed.
Or worse than oppressed. Some years ago, when Martha was
staying home with two toddlers, she was also reading
voraciously through the classics, rounding out her
education. We went to a party one night, whereat a
hard-core careerist launched a tirade, concluding with the
observation that It's a proven scientific fact that you
lose 10 I.Q. points for every year that you stay home with
small children.
I see,
Martha replied. You mean if I stay home
another seven or eight years, I'll finally fall to your
level?
So you're stupid and oppressed and abusive if you devote any attention to raising children when you ought to be trading up to a better BMW while polishing your résumé.
There's another way that you're a fourth-class citizen if you have a family. A landlord cannot discriminate against black people or brown people, or against Jews or Roman Catholics, or, in many cities, homosexuals. That's as it should be. Racial or religious or sexual discrimination is wrong.
But it's perfectly legal and acceptable to discriminate
against families. Just look through the classified ads this
morning and see how many apartments and rental houses
specify No children.
That's blatant discrimination,
and nobody cares. There aren't any protest marches or
demands for fairness.
It's easy to see why people aren't bothering with families these days. And if Wattenberg is right, we'll deserve the dismal future that awaits us.
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