“A baby is God’s opinion that life should go on. A book that does nothing to you is dead. A baby, whether it does anything to you, represents life. If a bad fire should break out in this house and I had my choice of saving the library or the babies, I would save what is alive. Never will a time come when the most marvelous recent invention is as marvelous as a newborn baby. The finest of our precision watches, the most super-colossal of our supercargo plants, don’t compare with a newborn baby in the number and ingenuity of coils and springs, in the flow and change of chemical solutions, in timing devices and interrelated parts that are irreplaceable. A baby is very modern. Yet it is also older than the ancients. A baby doesn’t know he is a hoary and venerable antique – but he is. Before man learned how to make an alphabet, how to make a wheel, how to make a fire, he knew how to make a baby – with the great help of woman, and his God and Maker.”
Carl Sandburg penned these words back in 1948, and in today’s world of even more “marvelous inventions”, it is good to be reminded of their truth. Lest we become jaded and discouraged with the state of affairs on the planet, each tiny child born, with hopeful eyes and a whole lifetime ahead, is indeed one more endlessly repeating sign that it is God’s opinion that life should continue. For those less inclined toward faith in a Creator, consider it then that there is a biological imperative that the species continue. So marvelous is this imperative, as Sandburg points out, that the most complex thing any man or woman will ever make, their own child, they need no instruction to accomplish… it’s nature.
We live in a day where we resist nature, and often rebel against it. Sometimes for good, but often for ill, we provide instruction and devices to circumvent and avoid what nature drives us to, procreation and parenthood. Natural selection is easy to explain in a simple “survival of the fittest” model, but becomes more complex when societal dynamics are introduced to the model. What drives a firefighter to enter a burning building to save another man’s child? How do such heroic acts that could easily result in death serve to advance the firefighter’s chances of extending his genetic influence in the gene pool? Maybe that’s what gives firefighters sex appeal! Who can say, but whether it be God himself, or some complex societal evolutionary dynamic, as much as it is man’s “nature” to procreate, it would seem to be society’s “nature” to protect children, all our children. When society no longer conforms to that nature, something has gone awry.
In all the noise of wars and rumors of wars it must be remembered that every true war involves a war on children, and they are always the innocent victims. If God does indeed have an opinion that life should go on, His libertarian streak when it comes to the matter of free will seems to insure that this life will not always be easy. The promise of the future in children seems ever to be at jeopardy because of those aberrations of nature, both individuals and groups, who ignore the imperative to save, guard and protect the children. The war in Syria has killed more than 7,000 children to date. One million children are exploited annually in the global commercial sex trade. Here in the US there are each year three million reports of child abuse involving more than six million children, and every year we perform over a million abortions, year after year, after year… after year. It is a testament to the biological imperative that the next generation always seems to have enough survivors to continue, and it is a testament to the durability of children that most grow up functional despite the winds of war.
If war is Hell, and it is, then the campaign invention of “The War on Women” was a gross misapplication of the term. In much the same way that “holocaust” should be reserved for when millions are butchered, and “Nazi” should be reserved for those doing the butchering; maybe the term “War” begins to lose the hellishness of its implication when we loosely toss it around to gain political advantage with a voting block. And so I am hesitant to refer to the inadvertent targeting of children in today’s society as a war, but the images of the victims attest to the aptness of the application.
It is beyond the scope of this blog to respond to the plight of children throughout the world, our focus must remain limited to the war on children here in our own nation, and more particularly its expression in the political meanderings of those we pay to serve us in positions of leadership. Like the snake in the Garden of Eden, those who portray themselves to be our dearest friends can often prove to be our mortal enemies. You can pretend that spending money on education is the same as providing education, but when you close the charter schools in Washington and New York to pay back your cronies in the teachers’ unions, your money is no longer paying for children’s education, it’s buying you votes, and lining the pockets of evil men. What was the hope of so many children at risk has been dashed at the directive of men claiming to be their protectors. It is a strange thing in this generation compared to those who went before. Each generation until now endured hardship in the hope and expectation that life would be easier and more fulfilling for their children. That no longer is our expectation, and in some ways, it would seem it is no longer our concern. We develop a healthcare law that pays for the older and sicker generation on the backs of their poorer but healthier children. We wince at the most minuscule of budget cuts while accruing debt for our children that amounts to 1.5 million dollars projected share for each child born this year. Even the programs we develop for children are regularly corrupted by the needs and desires of the adults, serving to replace rather than provide what is best for the child. Like so many parents today, our government mistakes pandering for parenting, and like helicopter parents our bureaucrats don’t know where to draw the line between assistance and control, protection and domination, sustaining and suffocation. An infant must be held, but a child always carried will never walk; caring is a balancing act of nurture and encouraging independence, and the best parents and governments know when each is called for.
IMHO: No society is bigger than “God’s opinion that life should go on”; nor do we have the power as a people to, with our own self-indulgence, circumvent the imperative of nature that there will indeed be a next generation. No, life will always go on; the resilience of children is well documented, they will survive. The quality of the life we leave them will determine how they remember us. Will we be remembered with fondness as a great generation, or counted among the worst? Looking back in history will our children and our children’s children consider us a blessing… or a curse?
