Thoughts from the ammo line

Ammo Grrrll observes A STERILE CULTURE. She writes:

The Shakers – they of the beautiful hymn “’Tis the Gift To Be Simple” — were a religious cult that gained a small measure of popularity in the U.S. from about 1780 until the last elderly recruit passed away in 1971. It was an odd amalgam of popular utopian ideas that never go out of style — communal farming, dividing profits amongst the faithful, men and women in leadership positions in equal numbers.

One teeny tiny flaw that prevented the Shakers’ ideas from gaining mass appeal? They also believed in celibacy. I expect this made it harder to recruit, especially among men. Celibacy did seriously impact the growth of the cult through natural propagation as well. The rules did allow indenture, adoption, and conversion, and some foundlings that were left on their doorsteps were supposedly loved and well cared for.

In most healthy cultures throughout the world, children are very much prized. A nation without elders, it is said, has no history, but a nation without children has no future. Israel, in my experience, is one of the most child-centered countries in the world. Even secular Israelis try to have at least three children, two for replacement and one for the Holocaust. For most of our history in America, children have been valued as well. In the rural economy before World War II, children were absolutely necessary for farm labor, the more the merrier.

In the mid-1940s, when the veterans had come home from World War II and had started making new babies about 15 minutes later, big families were the norm. After the horror of a World War, making beautiful new babies was a great affirmation of life.

Our family of three children, several years apart, was an outlier. Across the street was a family with 10 kids. We once watched as the three-year-old got swatted for not being entirely on top of minding her two-year-old brother. Behind us was a family with five girls. The husband wanted his wife to “try” for a boy one more time. But she was fine with stopping at five. (A great comic friend of mine, also named Susan used to have a funny bit in her act about being one of three girls with a baby brother of whom she said, “His name is Frankie, but because of his relative weight and importance in the family, we girls just called him The Baby Jesus.”)

Many, but far from all, of the large families back then were religiously observant Catholics and nowadays most very large families we know are either LDS or Orthodox Jews. The Rabbi and Rebbetzin with whom we spent the most time in St. Paul eventually had 8 kids. Another distinguished Chabad couple we knew had 14. We had a Shabbos meal once with a visiting Yemenite Israeli who told us he had over 100 first cousins. I have 15.

In 1968, Paul “We’re All Gonna Die!” Ehrlich came out with his silly book The Population Bomb and suddenly it became socially acceptable to fear and hate children. This also coincided with the Feminist Movement in which the entire enterprise of birthing and raising children was seen as a depressing chore preventing women from far more enriching experiences, such as leaving the house at an unseemly hour in one-size-fits-none pantyhose to type and file. We knew several young women who got sterilized in their 20’s.

At first Feminism pretended to be neutral on the subject of what women should do with their lives – “hey, we’re just all about OPTIONS!” (as we all should be). But very soon the veneer of “sure, you can be a CEO, a useful member of society OR, just go ahead and have kids” was peeled away to reveal the real agenda: Women’s “health,” we were assured, meant the unfettered “right” to kill their unborn children and raising them was definitely not as prestigious, important, or meaningful as any paid job.

Women with large families have reported encounters of bullying by the eco-freaks who have said things like “Your third child is breathing my air.” No lesser a personage than Bill Gates believes that children – though not his three — are the greatest danger to Mother Gaia, worse, apparently even than SUVs. It’s funny how few of these people who advocate “depopulating” the Earth seem willing to say, “Let me go first and show you how it’s done.” Thank God for Elon Musk. He has eight kids and believes that a very serious problem for humanity going forward is not enough people are having babies. “Get busy!” urges Elon.

Who will pay for Social Security? Who will clean the houses of the child-free and do the Mike Rowe Dirty Jobs? Who will fight the wars the progressive class seems to adore? Who will staff the Assisted Living places where the child-free go to die alone? Who will cure cancer?

Well, fiddle-dee-dee, they will think about that another day. For now, America is sliding toward a seriously sterile culture with attacks on several fronts. Let me briefly list just a few of the elements contributing to the sterility crisis. Space prevents much expansion.

First of all, young people in the industrialized countries the world over seem to be marrying at later ages or not at all. Our generations’ divorce rate has imbued many young people with a “What’s the point?” attitude. Couple that with a precipitous drop in religious grounding. Then you add in the current economic disaster, where home-owning is a pipe dream for most middle class young adults. Alarming numbers of young men in several countries are voluntarily celibate (and not just ‘til marriage…), something that would have been unthinkable to my generation. “Hooking up” just seems like too much trouble and effort. Those video games don’t just play themselves, you know.

The serious postponement of adulthood mitigates against forming a new family. If you can live in Mom’s basement until at least your mid-20s, and stay on Dad’s insurance until you are 26, you are very much incentivized to just spend $1,000 on that new iPhone, or new designer shoes without having to worry about how to put shoes on two or three kids.

Feminism, particularly, its “#MeToo” aspect, has dampened the normal ardor of college-age males. If male students or male co-workers are scared lust-less even to approach females without a Notarized permission slip for each step towards a happy ending, the normal paths for choosing a mate are blocked. The more insane workplaces have strict rules against even LOOKING at a woman for over five seconds. Do bells and whistles go off like violating “three seconds in the lane?”

Having avoided these shoals, a man even then is clearly not safe if 40 years later, some loon decides she was “assaulted” at a party that nobody remembers her being at, and she has no idea where it was, how she got there or how she got home. A man can be destroyed, fired, called a rapist, for one fumbling grope at a girl under the influence at a HIGH SCHOOL party. IF it even actually happened! Facts don’t really matter. All women must be believed unless the alleged perpetrator is a Democrat. Then, of course, it’s either Russian disinformation or she’s a trailer trash slut enticed by a dollar bill dragged through a trailer park.

A recent survey I saw said that 20 percent of the current younger generation identifies as some sort of LGBTQ variant. Of course, the variants change faster than COVID’s, so who knows? It goes without saying that the sperm count of lesbians is notoriously low and gay male sexual practices could not result in a pregnancy for all the tea in China. Without making any value judgment about same-sex attraction, it is undeniable that it does not produce children without help from the eggs or sperm of one of the opposite sexes.

When you consider the “next step” in permanent sterility – “transitioning” — actually removing or chemically altering the organs of reproduction such that they can never be used to procreate again – and making quite a fad of it, we are in deep water. An enraged Teacher/Groomer from Texas said that 20/32 of her students had “come out” to her as some element of Alphabet Soup. They were fourth graders. Age 9.

Now ask how many of those little kids once believed in Santa Claus. So Santa Claus is real, right, if all you have to do is believe? A child that age, nagged by a large scary adult, can be made to say ANYTHING. I had a psycho fourth grade teacher who particularly hated me. Had she said to me, “I think you really want to be a boy, don’t you?” I very well might have said, “Call me Ishmael,” if that meant she would let me take my nose out of the circle she had drawn on the blackboard and return to my desk. Besides, I might want to live in Palm Springs someday where I could get a lifetime paycheck just for being a girl pretending to be a guy. What a deal!

A Happy Passover to our Jewish friends and a Happy Easter to our Christian ones.

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