Here’s How To Actually Reverse The Baby Bust
The best way to promote fertility isn’t funding parenthood. It’s stopping the government programs that discourage people from having babies.The best way to promote fertility isn’t funding parenthood. It’s stopping the government programs that discourage people from having babies.Grateful for my parents and their 50 years of marriage
This Thanksgiving, I'm giving thanks to God for the gift of my parents and their upcoming 50th wedding anniversary.
Be not alarmed. All things considered, my Boomer parents, Richard and Karen, are in remarkably good health. That my family is not cherishing this holiday season in fear that it may be the last for one or both of them is itself a blessing.
We weren't always so lucky.
Just a few days before Thanksgiving in my senior year of high school, my father nearly died when an aortic aneurysm that had been silently ballooning in his chest suddenly ruptured. Only by the grace of God did he survive. So many others who have his condition, including late actor Alan Thicke, do not.
After that catastrophic event, my entire family underwent a thorough medical assessment, at which point doctors discovered a severe congenital heart defect in my mother, then in her early 40s. Over the next two decades or so, her health slowly deteriorated until she received a heart transplant three years ago. Had she not qualified for a transplant, she might not be here today.
I am not trying to be morbid this holiday season or to fixate unnecessarily on death. But I know that I am likely to outlive my parents, and when they're gone, Thanksgiving and Christmas will never be the same.
The older I get, the more I witness the heartbreak of other people my age losing their parents. In November 2021, my best friend from high school lost her mother to a rare and aggressive form of ALS. Six months later, my friend's father was gone too, less than a year after he and his wife celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.
Another friend, two years younger than I, is still reeling from the unexpected death of his mother in the summer of 2023. Yet another friend is savoring whatever time remains with his mother, who was recently diagnosed with cancer.
And I would be remiss if I did not remember the death of my beloved Aunt Linda in May 2021 and the loss of my husband's uncle a few weeks ago.
Though memento mori is a good mindset to adopt at any time of the year, I am not trying to be morbid this holiday season or to fixate unnecessarily on death. But I know that I am likely to outlive my parents, and when they're gone, Thanksgiving and Christmas will never be the same.
I know no parents are perfect, but I am extraordinarily fortunate to have the parents I have. My mother, a skilled designer, taught me about the importance of beauty and acting like a lady. My dad instilled in me a love of sports, and his quick wit reminded my siblings and me never to take ourselves too seriously.
But even more important than those lessons, my parents gave me the gift of my Catholic faith and taught me through words and actions the importance of the sacrament of marriage.
To this day, I would be devastated if my parents divorced, and I cannot imagine the pain and trauma endured by children of divorced parents. That every day my parents wake up and choose each other is a blessing worth recalling this Thanksgiving.
This spring, the two of them will celebrate 50 years of marriage.
My in-laws are also still married, as are the parents of my two sisters-in-law and my brother-in-law. These couples are not impervious to marital strife. At various times, some of them have overcome addiction, financial hardship, estrangement from other family members, and, of course, devastating illness. Commitment is a choice.
My brother and his lovely wife, the mother of my darling nieces and nephews, now have 20 years of marriage under their belt too. So it seems that while divorce can be a generational curse, marital commitment can be passed down through the generations as well.
God willing, my husband and I will someday celebrate 50 years together. If we do, we will have God and our parents and their respective examples of marriage and commitment to thank.
I don't know why God has thus far spared my parents, Richard and Karen, and continues to allow them to live full and relatively healthy lives, but I'm grateful that He has. However many Thanksgivings we have left together, I'm especially thankful this year for them and their faithful commitment to one another — in sickness and in health.
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In my last piece, I reflected on the state of the NFL’s relationship with the rise of data analytics and how it’s been contributing to the progress of the transhumanist agenda.
It made me ponder more deeply the questions we as human beings are confronted with as we hurtle headfirst into a more and more technology-dependent society.
The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared. And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this? They cope.
As we become more dependent on technology to complete the tasks that human beings have always performed, we’ve come to the point where we must ask ourselves … what exactly are we?
Division of labor
My mind naturally began to think about the division of labor within traditional family households.
A wife and mother would traditionally be a homemaker and nurturer of the children. A husband and father would traditionally be the one who would labor out in the world and bring home the income and provisions.
This gender-oriented division of labor came into being almost entirely out of necessity. Sure, maybe social ideologies sprang up over time about gender roles that may or may not have been healthy. But fundamentally, a husband and wife performed the roles they did because a man can do things only a man can do and a woman can do things only a woman can do.
But now, we live in a different world, a very affluent, technology-dependent world. Everything is taken care of for us. Machines do almost all the essential work for us, and it’s only a matter of time until they do the entirety of it.
The American economy isn’t a manufacturing one any more. When most Americans go to “work,” it is not to labor but to provide some kind of service, which both men and women can do. And compared to the rest of the world, we make a lot of money performing these services.
Idle hands
It’s given us Americans security and time. And with security and time, we’ve gotten bored. So bored that we make up new problems for ourselves just to give us an artificial sense of insecurity. People are so free from their traditional gender roles (and therefore actual problems) that they now identify as new genders.
That conservative commentator Matt Walsh was able to produce an entire documentary dedicated to answering the question “What Is a Woman?” is a clear sign of how out of hand the situation has gotten. Everyone had a big, hearty laugh as they watched some blue-haired child psychologists squirm and struggle to define what an adult female human being is in exact terms.
But the problem is real, and it’s much deeper than a predatory pharmaceutical industry pushing kids and adults into gender-affirming surgery.
The necessary question
To fully appreciate the scope of the question “What is a woman?” we must ask the necessary (and more urgent) follow-up question: What is a man?
Seriously, what is a man in the 21st century … and beyond? It’s the most important question that absolutely no one is thinking about.
Think about what I’ve already said within this one article. We live in a time when all traditional roles have been stripped from both genders due to affluence, which is due to the development of automated technology.
And because we don’t make anything any more, what do we offer as an economy instead? Health care, education, retail, and entertainment.
Or in other words – nurturing, child-rearing, homemaking, and sex.
Monetizing the feminine
Any role that’s ever been traditionally feminine has been taken out of the households and plugged straight into the economy. In his book "The New Politics of Sex," political theorist Dr. Stephen Baskerville cites G.K. Chesterton on the matter:
If people cannot mind their own business, it cannot possibly be made economical to pay them to mind each other’s business; and still less to mind each other’s babies. ... The whole really rests on a plutocratic illusion of an infinite supply of servants. When we offer any other system as a "career for women," we are really proposing that an infinite number of them should become servants, of a plutocratic or bureaucratic sort. Ultimately, we are arguing that a woman should not be a mother to her own baby, but a nursemaid to somebody else’s baby. But it will not work, even on paper. We cannot all live by taking in each other’s washing, especially in the form of pinafores.
Motherly instincts have merely been bureaucratized, resulting in every woman either being cooped up in an office doing meaningless paperwork or cooped up in a shoebox apartment making OnlyFans content. Or both.
No market for manhood
Meanwhile, masculine roles got absolutely and systematically shafted by modernity.
Wanna get married to the woman of your dreams and raise a family? Sorry, the no-fault divorce and state welfare machineries have all but made real, long-lasting marriage an unappealing artifact of history.
Wanna take masculine pride in your occupation or the money you make? Good luck. America hasn't been a manufacturing economy in decades. All productive jobs involving real labor have been outsourced to China, automation, or H-1B immigrants.
Any man who currently has a “masculine” job such as farmer, truck driver, construction worker, or oil rigger will be replaced by a robot running the latest ChatGPT woke programming within the next 25 years.
That’s where we're at as men, and that's where we're going. We've been systematically disenfranchised. We've lost the means to exhibit patriarchal authority over the family unit due to the failure of marriage policy, and all opportunities to pursue productive labor and upward mobility are quickly dwindling due to automation.
The things that gave men meaning in their lives have all but disappeared.
Plato's man cave
And how do the masculinity gurus of conservatism address this?
They cope. They preach “primitivism” as the escape hatch from modernity. Go hunt. Go chop wood. Drink whiskey. Eat beef.
Even Matt Walsh gives his diagnosis on how to be a man: Don’t take any sick days from work.
Yeah, Stacey is girlbossing as she runs up racks with her nursing job and OnlyFans side hustle with $500K saved up in the bank while you're busy telling young, impressionable boys to man up and stay committed to an office job that will have him replaced within a decade, all from the comfort of your man-cave studio.
There is no “manning up” in 2024 and beyond. Wake up. The system has all but wiped out everything that once allowed men to find meaning in their lives.
So we need to tackle the question seriously and sincerely.
What is a man?
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