- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Sonic_Spork again.
- You must spread some Reputation around before giving it to Ellis Bell again.
I see some of my family experiences in your various postings, which are much better writing than my own efforts and go a long way to make this forum so widely enjoyable.
I've written on here before that I grew up with some degree of poverty, a father who drank heavily and often abusive, his incapacitation from a stroke, job loss, near zero income, home foreclosed, frequent evictions, bill collectors at our door, Mom working seven days a week to try and make ends meet, people leaving bags of groceries on Mom's porch for us, pregnant sisters marrying drinkers, and a lot more; pretty much the whole poverty playbook. Poverty like that WILL scar you. I made it out of that scene about 50 years ago, but no matter how well we do financially, or how far west we move, I will always run from "it."
Part of my response to "it" is to never have kids, never risk having my back to a wall like my Mom, who, like a saint, soldiered her way through the hell of it all, fifteen years of hell, finally coming out the other side into stability. So, now, I donate to food banks, food drives and refuse to judge the victims caught up in the miasma of all the various shades and permutation of "it."
I deeply fault the axis of evil (religion, patriarchy and greed) for much of the mess mentioned in many postings. The despicable lies that keep feeding these beasts, lies like "that's just the way the world is" or "you just have to love the sinner" or "boys will be boys" and so many more lies. One of worst lies we've heard a lot is "it's a man's world." Religion feeds off that lie, relegating women to second class, powerless status. Lies made all the worse when no one ever FIXES the damned sinners or incarcerates them for raping pre-teen nieces or daughters or beating a wife black and blue in a drunken rage. Forty years ago I sat in meetings for Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) and heard one woman relate of watching her father shoot her mother and other people who also saw or suffered horrific things.
Even your family doctor could be a moron perpetuating lies. I read an article on
Endometriosis and several of the responding women reported being told by doctors that the extreme pain of Endo was "just part of being a woman," but Endo is very treatable. More lies. Lies without end.
No way in hell was I going to bring kids into this FUBAR world. Many of the younger generation see through the lies and recognize just how FUBAR things are and want no part of it. Many won't work for crap wages, many now fight to unionize for a fair share of the pie, many won't get on the treadmill of owning a car, many won't live in distant, sterilized suburbia and opt for walkable in-city living.
Many people in the better-educated developed world apparently feel the same way. They note that the rapacious greed of a global economy, increasingly controlled by the obscenely wealthy, has made a stable life with a family an increasingly distant possibility. That understanding is reflected in lower birth rates.