Sunday Morning: Life vs. Death

posted at 12:01 am on July 19, 2009 by The Other McCain
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If you like what I’m doing, one way to get me to do more of it is to tell me how much you like the way I do it. This may partially explain why Mrs. Other McCain is a mother of six wonderful children, but check this out:

“RS McCain has written a must-read on the origins of John Holdren’s anti-people philosophy.”
– Pundette

“Sometimes Robert Stacy McCain is so funny that I forget how smart he is.”
– Matthew Archbold

Those are two reactions to a long post I did Thursday morning. It was also linked at the Rhetorican (“Follow the Money”) and drew comments from Jennifer, Rhymes With Right, and the Rev. David R. Graham. The same post was also cross-posted at The Green Room, where it elicited this comment:

In some other previous post, on a topic similar, I asked who paid for the commercials for planned parenthood and zpg that I was inundated with as a child in the 60’s. You’ve provided some answers – thank you for that. I’m more than 50 years now and I still clearly recall receiving the message on the TV and taking it as a fact. Talk about organized propaganda – I still clearly remember it!
ericdijon on July 16, 2009 at 8:33 PM

To which I replied:

Oh, absolutely. I distinctly remember being at a swimming pool in LaGrange, Georgia (where my grandmother lived) and hearing a commercial for Zero Population Growth on somebody’s portable radio. And I was like, “Huh?”
Thirty-five or 40 years ago, that message was everywhere. Paul Ehrlich was a frequent guest with Johnny Carson on “The Tonight Show.” So, why don’t you hear that message so frequently and explicitly anymore?
1. IT WORKED — By 1976, the U.S. total fertility rate had fallen to about 1.7 and not all the pro-life activism in the past three decades has made a dent in the Culture of Death. The recent rise in the U.S. TFR to 2.05 is entirely due to the influx of tens of millions of higher-fertility by immigrants. Among U.S.-born non-Hispanics, any recent statistical upward trend in TFR is (a) minor and (b) mostly a function of marginal factors like deperate pre-menopausal IVF efforts by Baby Boom women.
2. CULTURAL MOMENTUM — The elite Malthusians spent tens of millions on their anti-baby propaganda campaign over the course of several decades. They especially targeted influential “opinion leaders” like journalists, politicians and academics, so as to create a ripple effect. Once babyphobia entrenched itself in conventional wisdom — “Well, everybody knows [insert anti-natalist talking point] . . .” — there was no need for continuing the propaganda campaign, at least with the saturation intensity that the ZPG/PP campaign manifested in the 1960s and ’70s.
Generally speaking, the more elite someone’s education level nowadays — the higher their ranking in their high-school class, the higher the average SAT score at their college, the more years they spent pursuing postgraduate education — the less likely they are either (a) to have a child before age 30, or (b) to have more than two children in their lifetimes.
I talk to smart young people all the time in D.C., folks whose incomes at age 25 are greater than my own. They will swear up and down that they can’t afford to get married or have children, and look at me like I’m crazy for thinking otherwise. And whatever you do, don’t try to tell them they’ve been indoctrinated with this counterfactual belief.
The weird thing is, there’s no difference in this regard between secular liberals and most young people who claim to be “conservative” Christians. Sigh.
The Other McCain on July 18, 2009 at 2:58 PM

Given such evidence of interest in this subject, obviously it deserved a separate follow-up post. During my decade at The Washington Times — the last four years as editor of the “Culture, Etc.” page — I reported on many of the biggest stories of the Culture Wars. Certainly, my knowledge of the history of these issues, and the skills (or dumb luck) that will push my personal blog past the 2-million-hit mark today, would be useful in this regard. And yet I don’t do it.

REASONS OR EXCUSES?

The reason I haven’t blogged more about these issues since leaving the Times is that, when you’re “just a blogger,” there is very limited readership for such stuff. Everybody’s got opinions on these subjects, and when “just a blogger” tries to discuss them in an authoritative fashion . . .

Well, if a blogger posts something, but nobody links it, so nobody reads it and nobody comments, et cetera, those 400 or 600 or 800 words might as well never have been written. I’m not Catholic, and most pro-life bloggers are Catholics who only link other Catholic bloggers. They don’t know me from Adam’s housecat, so for a Protestant to do pro-life blogging feels like a waste of time and energy.

Plus there is the matter of pride. I’m a professional. I write for money, and have done so for more than two decades. To feel compelled to write for free . . . you have no idea how I burn with shame to be “just a blogger,” especially when I see what’s produced (and what’s not produced) by some journalists. But even if I could overcome my sinful stiff-necked pride, even if every word I wrote for free didn’t feel as if someone was purposefully humliating me, the point of writing is communication, and writing stuff that nobody reads is not very useful. 

Perhaps because I work so hard on stuff that I get paid for, or that might get linked — and therefore read — elsewhere, I’ve lately tended to neglect some opportunities for which I should be grateful. Which means that, contrary to my repeated admonition to other bloggers about the importance of persistence, I’ve allowed discouragement to get the best of me, for which I apologize.

See, I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil . . .
– Deuteronomy 30:15

That anyone would choose the way of death and evil is something that we profess to find astonishing, yet it happens every day, and we all do it. Just ask yourself, “Have I forgotten to pray for those who despitefully use me? Have I passed by the waylaid traveler on the Jericho road, when it was in my power to be a Good Samaritan?”

DEATH BY NEGLECT

By not doing good, we choose evil, just as by not pursuing the ways of life, we choose death. And sadly, we often don’t even realize we are making a choice, until it is too late. Someone dies, and I think, “Why didn’t I talk to them more when I had the chance?” Or I learn of some horrible pain in someone’s life — they get sick, lose their job or get a divorce, before I even knew they were having any kind of problem — and I think, “Why didn’t they tell me? Maybe I could have helped.” But I didn’t reach out to them, and they didn’t know I cared, and so they never imagined it would do any good to talk to me about their problems.

Mea culpa, as the old-school Catholics say, mea maxima culpa.

My sinful heart wants to judge others for their failures — when they don’t return my phone calls — and yet who has been a greater failure than me? Mea culpa.

People get angry at me for no good reason and I resent it. Yet I often become frustrated and unleash my fury at someone whose only error is to have crossed my path at the wrong time. Mea culpa.

Sometimes I feel neglected, but who have I neglected? Sometimes I get my feelings hurt, but how many times have I hurt other people’s feelings? What sin could anyone ever committ against me that I haven’t committed against others? What a wretched, evil, heartless person I am, to think that I should ever deserve any favor, courtesy or blessing, and yet what bounties of unsolicited blessings have been showered upon me? Mea maxima culpa.

‘FLYING MONKEYS’ IN THE CULTURE WAR

During a smoke break while I was writing this, I did what I habitually do when I’m not online: Go through the speed-dial on my cell phone, looking for someone I need to call. Dialed a source on the IG-Gate story, but no answer. Dialed a buddy, but no answer. Conservative lesbian Cynthia Yockey? Well, OK, let’s call her.

“Hi, Stacy!” she said, and next thing I knew she was telling me about her online war with the left-wing blog pests she calls “flying monkeys” (a reference to the minions of the Evil Witch in The Wizard of Oz.) Somehow, Cynthia had crossed the radar of certain Palin-hating leftoids, who had decided to attack her in the most vicious personal ways possible. (Michelle Malkin, are you paying attention?) Rather than throw traffic back at them — she’s a lesbian ex-Democrat who never heard of a “fair fight” — Cynthia had put up a post with this provocative title:

Sadly, yes! ‘Obama’s mama was trash and only 17-years-old when she got knocked up’

Beautiful. She had done that on Tuesday, but nobody in the conservative blogosphere paid attention. Mea culpa. And Cynthia told me about how the Obamabots had shut down a good libertarian woman blogger by their usual dishonest fascist methods. Mea maxima culpa.

I blame myself for this, because I have failed to act when it was within my power to help. And there are many other instances I could relate. My laziness, my selfishness, my neglectful habits – these are sins, you see. And who is not similarly guilty? I just shake my head when people tell me they can’t attend such-and-so event because . . . oh, well, never mind the excuses. The point is, people waste their lives in the most frivolous and trivial ways you could possibly imagine. As do we all.

OK, so I’m 49 and will be 50 in a few months. I’ve already outlived better men than me. Who knows how much more time I have left? So if I’m wasting time . . . mea culpa.

Life is too short, and death too long, for anyone to choose death by wasting their life and think that they are innocent. Time is money, you know, so when you pay money to waste your time, as a friend of mine said recently, you grieve the heart of God.

Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.

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