Donkasaurus Post

Several months ago, the Washington Post brought us a strange and somewhat disturbing rant against an alleged ”obnoxious misuse of freedom.”  Such misuse consisting not of the Post’s election to publish this drivel from Will, but the actual choice by an individual to wear blue jeans — of which Will, in what has clearly been an edited, watered down column since its initial publication, still suggests is showing a level of disrespect for those who have to bear the suffering of seeing others clothed in them.

Today, in a column not nearly as confused (although it would hard to come close to Will’s level), earnest and appreciable Michael Gerson — former Bush Speechwriter — still manages a decent attempt to bring the debate back to Andy Griffith type levels. (Emphasis added):

This is the period of life [one’s 20s[ in which society’s most important social commitments take shape — commitments that produce stability, happiness and children.

This part about social commitment’s — namely marriage, producing “happiness,” seems a rather subjective view, and perhaps an odd claim to be making on the editorial pages of one of the nation’s leading newspapers.

Still, we veer toward marriage because it fits us, and perhaps it does make us happier. 

But it is at the end of his piece that Gerson’s words seem to become a bit imbued with just the slightest tinge of communal social engineering pressures:

There is little use in preaching against a hurricane of social change. But delaying marriage creates moral, emotional and practical complications. The challenge, as always, is to humanize change. The answer, even in the relational wasteland, is responsibility, commitment and sacrifice for the sake of children.

Some,who have elected to delay marriage (or have had marriage delayed through no unreasonable doing or choosing of their own), might take reasonable umbrage at Gerson’s direct, and rather ludicrous, assertion that this creates moral complications. In fairness, Gerson does seem only to be referring to the rather puritanical, if on a personal level perhaps in some ways emotionally fulfilling, notion of the avoidance of “premarital sex.” But it’s still a dangerous assertion.

As for his concluding point, “for the sake of the children”: 

If one elects to have children (and why would one not? We exist to procreate, it is in our genes), there is evidence to suggest that commitment (and its continued fulfillment) between those so procreating, and at least relationship fulfilled, offspring, is positively, albeit mildly, correlated. 

And we say that if any one of us here were simply unborn, non conceived “ideas” in God’s mind, and God gave the option of being born to less than the ideal “fully committed” situation, or not being born at all, we should not hesitate to opt for the former.  But if given the option, all other things being equal, to parents who were committed, and those that were not, we should not hesitate to choose the latter.

Still, there is something a bit creepy about Gerson, in the 2000s, writing about how the 20s is a time for the “social commitments” (of marriage) in order to “bring happiness,” and then concluding his piece with the assertion that the answer lies in responsibility, commitment, and sacrifice, for the sake of the children.  The as of yet unborn children, the children who will only be born through the choices of these same individuals of whom Gerson is seeking his version of responsibility from.  The same individuals who will be creating “moral” complications by delaying marriage: Since sex is not about intelligent personal emotional choice, growth, and responsibility, you see; but about “morality.”  (And where does Gerson get this from?)

We wonder if, aside from the personal choices which Gerson seems to have little problem morally musing upon, he has such similar feelings with respect to our collective actions in despoiling the food chain with increasing levels of accumulating toxicological contaminants, destroying whole mountain tops to continue to feed our insatiable appetite for coal when there is an entire sky full of clean energy from the sun and elsewhere waiting to be harnessed (but we can’t do that!), wrecking forest and natural habits to such degree that species are rapidly becoming extinct, and rapidly increasing the atmospheric concentrations of long term climate altering and thus ecology destroying greenhouse gases. 

We know that Gerson believes that climate change should be addressed. (And how long did it take him to come to that conclusion, when the basic science, if not the almost irrelevant amount of tiny data that has now flowed in, has been essentially unchanged for a few decades.) But how about the fact that YOUR KIDS — when they consume, say, seafood for an example, or any other of a number of other natural and manufactured products — are eating unhealthy amounts of carcinogenic toxins that have bio-accumulated or been added, or even in many cases the neurological toxin mercury, with this latter largely as a result of that very same aforesaid, and stupid, coal reliance. (One doesn’t read about that latter point all that often in the increasingly reactionary Washington Post editorial pages.)

Maybe we should be hands off on people’s individual mores, and a bit more hands on when it comes to those actions, which by definition, are not personal and individual, but, which, collectively, we all share, we have no choice but to share, and which directly affect us all, even if we can not directly see the connections.