The Incredibly Gross Bad Faith of Birth Rate Worries
Let's call the birth rate worries what they are: Fretting that the white supremacist hierarchy could one day be toppled through sheer numbers
The love for their children was in every gesture, every word, every look. You could sense it – feel it – even from a distance.
A mom and dad, dressed in what appeared to be used clothing – him in an oversized collared shirt with a small hole in the shoulder, wearing oversized sneakers, her in Santa Claus leggings and a faded James Madison University t-shirt – there with their three kids at an amusement park in Ocean City, Maryland. Their oldest appeared to be 12 or so. The middle kid, a girl, looked to be a few years younger. They had a chunky little baby too, bouncing in the arms of mother, who was pregnant.
They had come prepared to the mind-numbingly expensive park: The baby’s stroller was packed to the brim with bottled water and snacks and extra clothing. There would be no shelling out $4.50 for a small Gatorade. There would be no $9 hotdogs. Those were for me and my dumb middle-class ass.
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I observed the family from the sliver of shade a Coke machine provided me on a sweltering, mercilessly windless August day. My son and daughter were bouncing from ride to ride, oblivious to me cowering in the shade of a soda machine, wiping sweat from my brow and being generally miserable on the third day of our beach vacation. It probably took me too long to give up the shady spot to the mom and her baby, but I did, and she thanked me with a nod. “Gracias,” she said.
My kids securely on some sort of ride that flipped them up and down and sideways, I watched as the dad happily escorted his son to the next ride. Smiles beamed on their faces, and before the boy could race to get in line for the ride, his father playfully grabbed his face and kissed him on the cheek. He whipped around to his wife, there in the shade of the soda machine, and snatched the baby from her, twirled her around, and tossed her into the air, catching her like an old pro. This family was present. In the moment. For them, nothing else mattered on this cloudless, hot-as-shit summer day.
The man was downright giddy. He was carefree, bubbling with joy. This day – the rides whirling, the music blaring, the children running and laughing – clearly meant everything to him. The happiness he derived from his children’s happiness was plain for all to see. There I was, in full Martyr Mode, wishing I could be at a beachside bar drinking a hard seltzer and watching golf, cursing the heat and the park’s absurd prices and the sweat dripping into my sunglasses and the weird pain in my knee that I was sure was a torn ACL. I was suddenly and completely overwhelmed with self loathing. I am a privileged man spending god knows how much money to take my kids to an amusement park. I’m hardly rich, but I have enough money to waste on shit like that and forget about it with the next month’s credit card payment.
And here was this dad, (very) likely a man with next to no financial security, being downright jovial with his wife and three kids – with another on the way. Then my self loathing morphed into judgment: Why did this couple have so many kids?
***
Long before I knew of the political and cultural goals of pro-birth types, I was always squeamish when a national leader or a know-nothing billionaire or a right-wing activist would fret about low birth rates and urge people to have more kids. Telling people to procreate is creepy as shit. Instructing and pleading with folks to engage in this most private of acts is and always has been weird and off putting. I suppose it doesn’t help that only folks on the right whine about declining birth rates, and tie it into their insane anti-abortion agenda.
