Contraception Destroying Rural America (statistics, biased, compared, retire)
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I working on a response to a previous post of yours, but I wanted to tackle this one.
How can you acknowledge these problems, and still blame contraception for the problems? It's difficult to converse with you since you are all over the map - Be your neighbor's keeper but not the refugee's in Iraq. Regulations and finances are legitimate problems but the real culprit is birth control. What??? It's easy for me to understand why some folks have abandoned this ship to its inevitable future.
Ma'am, I acknowledged in the very first post that the problem was multi-faceted and even specifically mentioned agriculture. The contraception mentality is a big contributor to rural decline, but it certainly isn't the only one and I never claimed it was. Sorry I can't give you a straw man argument to knock over.
Yes, be your brother's keeper first. You can't do anything about your 50th cousins in Iraq. Having children won't hurt them and not having children won't save them.
What are you saying? Let us start there. Because, as I said, mixing migration and contraception for an excuse is rather stupid. Your thread is about...?
If the families had had more children, the children, along with the sacrifices, may have had the opposite effect you are suggesting. More stressors on a family, and the expense of children is a stressor, can cause the dissolution of a family, or cause the family to move to an urban area where the family has a better chance of meeting its financial needs. Your proposal could possibly lead to even greater erosion of rural populations.
I think that's a possibility for some families, but not most.
Ma'am, I acknowledged in the very first post that the problem was multi-faceted and even specifically mentioned agriculture. The contraception mentality is a big contributor to rural decline, but it certainly isn't the only one and I never claimed it was. Sorry I can't give you a straw man argument to knock over.
Yes, be your brother's keeper first. You can't do anything about your 50th cousins in Iraq. Having children won't hurt them and not having children won't save them.
WOW! With that pearl of wisdom, I'm out. Others can try to find the logic here.
I think that's a possibility for some families, but not most.
Most farm families are struggling financially to begin with. Adding financial burdens would be counter-productive for those farm families. And when the financial burdens become so great that they can no longer sustain themselves, the family breaks or moves. Which damages the community as well.
This is an interesting and thought-provoking thread. Very rarely is contraception brought up in a negative light here, even though it used to be considered such an evil as to be a taboo topic (kind of like bestiality today). Today, contraception - not only on these boards, but also in general society - is perceived as a universally beneficial thing, in fact a moral duty most of the time.
Although I do hold the traditional view (that contraception is evil), I do not see it as the cause of the decline of rural America. For decades, agriculture has been moving from a family-based to an industrial model. The days of the old "family farm" have been numbered for many years, although the recently heightened interest in organic and local food has quelled this somewhat and might save it to some extent. I know of a newlywed couple, the wife of which attended my college and is from a farming family herself. She married an organic farmer in northern Wisconsin, and he does not want her to use birth control because it's "less natural". While this might not be the motive of most family farming operations, additional hands on the (family) farm are almost always an economic benefit. However, except for the local and organic segment of the market, which is still very much has niche status, family farms have continued to be on the decline. The organic market simply cannot sustain a large-scale migration to rural areas, or even slow down the trend of emigration to urban areas. The industrial model of hiring immigrants to do the dirty work while producing big profits for the shareholders and board is simply more efficient from the economic (and labor, since less "hands" are required) viewpoint. This is the real cause of the death of rural America, not so much contraception or even "boredom". While much of the dying farming towns may not have much to do in terms of places to go, the advantage of the cities is not nearly as strong in this age of the Xbox, internet, etc. (provided, of course, that you can get high-speed, non-satellite internet access on the family farm) as it was 20 or even ten years ago.
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