James Lee and I might have bellied up to the bar together and shared us a good rant, if not for that unfortunate homicidal nut job thing he had going on.
Lee’s the guy whose grievances against Discovery Communications brought him two days ago to the company’s headquarters in Silver Spring, Maryland, where he held three people hostage while armed with a handgun and explosive devices. Police shot and killed him after he allegedly pointed the gun at one of his captives.
A big part of Lee’s beef with Discovery had been his contention that its TLC cable TV channel irresponsibly promotes population growth by airing such shows as Kate Plus 8 and 19 Kids and Counting. Well, see, this has been a soapbox on which I’ve been standing for years—albeit not one I’ve ever accessorized with lethal weaponry and lugged into an office building, or expressed on the Web in a grandiose and bilious manifesto (at www.savetheplanetprotest.com) that megalomaniacally concludes, “These are the demands and sayings of Lee.”
Why, not a week before the gunman’s demented overkill got him killed, I’d e-mailed a friend that day’s Dilbert cartoon, under the subject line “Why I Hate the Duggars.” (The Duggars being the contraceptive-eschewing clan that’s documented on 19 Kids and Counting.) Dilbert has been asked by a female co-worker to “bring an appropriate gift” to the baby shower of a colleague who is having triplets. In the closing panel, the honoree opens the present and observes, “It’s a … book on how to lower my carbon footprint?” Am unsmiling Dilbert responds, “You’re killing us all.”
Ha! Now that’s funny!
OK, OK, before I start getting angry posts from ... well, I’m not sure who’d write them, because if you’re reading this you’re one of 15 or 20 friends of mine who know that I don’t hate kids, and that I in fact encourage controlled procreation so there’ll always be younger generations to help share my tax burden and, eventually, change my adult undergarments. But still, I feel compelled to state clearly that, unlike James Lee, I’ve absolutely no interest in (again from the manifesto) “stopping the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies!”
While anyone who’s ever caught a whiff of poopy diaper readily would concede that human babies can, indeed, be disgusting—and while I agree that overpopulation is killing this planet—I strenuously draw the line at such solutions of Lee’s as encouraging mass sterilization and increased infertility.
Can I say this, though? As an aging technophobe, I’m slightly endeared by the late maniac’s apparent conviction that simply airing a revamped program lineup on a basic cable channel will turn the environmental tide. As if a twittering and texting nation will look up from its tiny illuminated screens long enough to watch and absorb the lessons of such James Lee-endorsed fare as The World Without Us—Seriously!, Breakfast with the Barrens and Zero and Stopping.
Lynn and I are childless by choice, so I can’t profess to personally “get” the allure of parenthood. Cats strike me as much more fun and considerably cheaper than children, if perhaps equally destructive. But hey, to each his or her own, I say. Many people consider children life's greatest blessing, and parenthood life’s crowning achievement. Also, some folks are allergic to cats. Whatever. It’s all good.
It’s all good until, that is, we start rewarding people for having kids by the busload, by making TV stars out of them. That seriously gets my goat. The same goes for when some fertility drug-happy couple in the Midwest drops a seven-spot, appears on the Topeka CBS affiliate, becomes a national story and ends up with so much cash and corporate help that they’re set from Pampers through college. Do you want to know what I’d like to send that mom and dad? Back in time, with a starter kit from Planned Parenthood.
So, I hear what James Lee was saying about the super-breeders. And I don’t dispute that “population growth is a real crisis,” that “humans are the most destructive creatures around,” or that the world’s wildlife is being needlessly sacrificed to ever-growing amounts of farmland. (All of those are among Lee’s better-reasoned and less hysterically expressed points.) However, had old James and I ever sat down at the bar together to rail against the stupidity and indefensibility of Kate and its TV ilk, I might in a very gentle way have suggested to him that he’d do better to push such things as veganism, safe sex, and family planning than those dreadfully draconian solutions of his.
Except that, oh yeah, that particular conversation might’ve ended with him going all James Lee on my ass. You see, that’s the crux of the problem. Your Unibomber types seldom are 100% wrong about things. But they do tend to be 100% crazy.
2 comments:
I read that in India they are giving couples incentives (type? I dunno) to delay having children. This seems like a much better approach than the Chinese's version of limiting children to 1 per couple, which gets into a lot of ethical problems. And I, like you, thought that the Waltons were a bit selfish even in the days before the pill. Where do people get the idea that just because they CAN have 19 kids, they should?
The abundance of Waltons may have been a byproduct of the need to stay warm in a big, drafty house in those pre-central heating days.
I believe India is offering a financial incentive to delay childbirth. I read recently that India is on track eventually to surpass China as the world's most-populous nation. (This just in: TLC-Mumbai is developing a reality show called Paresh and Shilpa Plus 16 and the In-Laws and Extended Family.)
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