I decided the world had gone off the deep end around 2000 – I was attending a class on time management and the woman from HR teaching the class said in all seriousness that it’s important to remember to schedule unscheduled time in your schedule… This in a country where most people are spending 8 hours a day watching TV.
We as a country have “progressed” to the point where the government takes so much of our income that couples raising children can’t afford to only have the husband work and have Mom out of the work force for 10 years while the children experience growing up with a mother who loves them and a father who isn’t being badgered into doing the housework after working all day.
The result is – other than the unmarried moms living on government handouts – fewer and fewer children being born, and many of those being raised in child care and/or single parent homes – and then we’re shocked that they grab a gun and shoot random people or kill themselves drinking cough syrup.
The European socialist answer to this is – of course – more government mandated solutions. More child care, mandated parenting time off for employers, better public transit, more government housing, more gender equality, more education – the result is cultures in Western Europe that will breed themselves into non-existence and be overwhelmed by the unenlighteghtened cultures where women are baby factories owned by their husbands.
I would like to think there is a middle ground somewhere, but time is running out before all our promises to each other come due.
Art, these cultures are not breeding themselves into oblivion, they are aborting themselves into oblivion. The USA for example, is 50 million short since the seventies, and we wonder why we we are speaking mexican. A culture so self centered, short sighted, and immoral that families go by the wayside, then even newborn babies are killed when the abortion fails, will soon have nice legal death panels to take care of the elderly and infirm. Aren’t we civilized?
I would attribute it more to the birth control pill. Abortion is significantly skewed toward the unproductive underclass. Planned [non]Parenthood doesn’t tend to put its clinics in the neighborhoods where the top 1% live.
But blaming the pill or abortion is about the same as blaming guns for shootings. It’s decades if cultural pressure and legal changes like no fault divorce and broadening of the definition of “domestic violence” and “child abuse” that makes it increasingly in attractive to successful men to take on the responsibility of being husband and father.
At least the crime rate is down. 😉
http://www.freakonomics.com/2005/05/15/abortion-and-crime-who-should-you-believe/
If we have no children at all, in 16 years the automobile accident rate by teenagers will plummet! Of course, it won’t become zero because there will be immigrant children to take their place.