Splicetoday

Politics & Media
Dec 31, 2013, 09:56AM

Let's Self-Destruct

Why have kids if there’s no future?

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Yesterday morning in the shower I was listening to Dan Rodricks talk on Baltimore’s public radio station WYPR with journalist Lauren Sandler about how the country’s birthrate is at its lowest point in recorded history, and how the idea that having kids is an essential step towards becoming a normal, well-adjusted adult. Sandler mentioned specifically how having kids gave meaning to the lives of the parents. The thought “How could I possibly bring any children into this life?” has been around before any of us were born, but can you blame anyone for thinking like that? The Great Recession has dampened expectations of anything but a diminished future built around a collapsing culture. I don’t know if I want kids, but the option might not even present itself: I’m 21 now, and there’s a consensus in the scientific community that the damage we’ve done to the planet’s climate is irreversible and will probably lead to another Great Extinction within our lifetime, and certainly within the century.

How can you not feel pessimistic when people like Matt Drudge still sarcastically cite huge snowstorms as evidence that “global warming,” an egregious misnomer that still makes people think the phenomenon will only make the planet hotter. It’s almost 2014, how is this not clear? Climate change is making the weather more extreme in both directions. Forget about not making a living as a writer or an artist, how about the prospect of fighting in a guerrilla war when the food runs out? Our country is not a special snowflake. Generation X was disillusioned; we’re practically anesthetized to the outside world. We know about every atrocity that is committed in our collective name, and we can’t even begin to process it. The horror of our behavior after the unspeakable horror of 9/11 has all put us in the fetal position. The idea of bringing a child into a powder-keg world to give our own lives meaning seems selfishly cruel and unnecessary, only because they might not have a world to grow up in.

The early teens are over. The hope of another Roaring 20s is dim but we have nothing to lose and no one to look after. Let’s self-destruct on our own terms.

—Follow Nicky Smith on Twitter: @MUGGER1992

Discussion
  • Nicky, I normally love your stuff, but this doesn't cut it. The Global Warming Religion gives most the rationale to flagellate themselves, and, you, the chance to just give up. Assuming all the dire forecasts are correct, we are not talking about the end of life on earth...or anything approaching that. When we don't give in to despair, we humans are pretty clever, as evidenced by all the people who aren't starving now as predicted in the 70's (THE POPULATION BOMB) or all the oil and gas coming out of our country when it was considered a certainty that "peak oil" had hit the US 20 years ago. Think about everyone who has made it past the Depression, or for that matter, the Holocaust of the Killing Fields of Cambodia. All devastating, but not reasons to stop living. Never give up, Never surrender!

    Responses to this comment
  • I'm using hyperbole because I feel really paranoid about the weather getting weirder and weirder every year, terrorism, mass shootings. Sudden disasters are everywhere. I take the word of the scientific community but I just don't know. I felt bleak last night, but this morning I'm with you.

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  • With you too d. Worked with a young man who escaped the Killing Fields, running through the jungle past others dead in the water. His advice, if I ever found myself in that situation and had to drink the water? Scuff the surface with the edge of one hand and drink with the other. The surface is the least clean. Never tested his theory, but no matter, Ken never gave up. Last I saw him, this Cambodian twentysomething was driving a nice new Tacoma pickup on Rt 128, past the Stop & Shop, presumably with the radio on. I may not care to marry the modern world, but I love it.

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