[lit-ideas] Re: Good Ole' Missouri
- From: "Mike Geary" <atlas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 18 May 2006 03:03:21 -0500
AA:
Sorry, John, living with unmarried parents, who often are uncommitted to
each other, is not good for children. <<
What's not good for children? Living with unmarried parents or living with
people who are uncommitted to each other? I know unmarried people who are
very committed to each other. I know married people who are basically
strangers to each other. Marriage seems to me to have nothing to do with
anything but social, legal questions. There are many good and valid reasons
why people deeply committed to one another don't or can't get married.
Surely you don't equate certain social mores and legalities with love and
commitment to children.
Children bond easily and then are torn away when the relationship ends and
moves on to someone else.<<
So they should live in emotionally cold, angry, hostile, sometime violent
environments? I assume you don't mean this. I assume you mean that we
should all be perfect and there should be no unhappy relationships. Amen.
Children also need a mom and a dad (mentally stable obviously, which a lot
of parents aren't).<<
Mentally stable. Emotionally stable. Financially stable. Socially stable.
Stability, that's what children need. But even the ground beneath your feet
is unstable and guess what, children almost always survive, often even
thrive, in the most adverse of circumstances. I personally know some people
who are loving, generous, caring people whose childhoods were total hells.
I know others who didn't survive so well. I grew up in an immensely loving
environment, yet I'm a spoiled, mocking, mean, snide, cynical, dismissive
bastard -- I'm certainly as cynical of humanity as you are, except that I
celebrate our climb out of the mud even as I confess to loving the mud. I
feel sorry as hell for my kids, the fruit of my loins, but so far they seem
to be loving, kind, prospering, generous people and parents, fools that they
are.
Gay couples don't care about a child's need for two (stable) parents, only
their own "need" to have a child.<<
I assume what you mean here is that gay couples don't care about a child's
need for two (stable) parents OF THE OPPOSITE SEX. I don't know how you
know what gay couples care about, and it's not important except that you
seem to know absolutely nothing about gays or gayness or gay relationship
stability, but I'll let that pass. Let's just focus on the child. Most of
all a child needs love, emotional and material support, stability, and lots
of other things like someone who knows how to tie various knots to pass the
first test in Scouting -- which my stupid father didn't know and didn't even
care to learn, no wonder I'm a failure. And yet, had I been raised by a
couple of gay guys, I probably wouldn't be stuck doing air conditioning
work, I'd be draping lamp shades with shawls ending in unimaginably
intricate, beautiful knots and making ten times what I'm making now and
enjoying it. God, I wish I were gay or at least raised by gays. But what
if I'd been raised by lesbians? Would I have turned out a sensitive New Age
guy? or a pussy-whipped whiner? or their impossible dream -- which I am
forbidden to see. It doesn't matter. I would have turned out, as we all
do, the product of sky and earth, sun and moon, a tugging sea and a million
years of enormously complex human history, rich beyond telling, evil beyond
telling, loving beyond telling, a chance toss of DNA. Certainly our social
environment plays an important part in shaping us, but only a part, and an
undeterminable part. Everything is beyond foretelling. Will we grow up to
embrace Islamists, Mexican illegal immigrants, lesbians and gays and even,
God forbid, conservatives? Or will we want to kill them all? Everyone not
like me offends me to some extent, I confess. But as the humanity-rejoicing
Joyce reminded us through Mulligan: "Look at the sea, what does it care
about offenses?" Chuck your theories, Andy, "the Sassenach wants his
rashers". It's the belly, not the mind, the belly, not the soul, not the
psyche, it's the belly that drives us all. Concentrate on the belly if you
want to improve humanity. A full belly looks at a rose and says How
beautiful, an empty belly eats it. Look to the belly.
Leftist that I am, I would make it illegal for single parents to have
children,<<
I would say that if this is truly what you believe, love, you're no leftist,
you're a full blown fascist. Celebrate that if you can.
Mike Geary
Memphis
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