RUTHFULLY YOURS

For Socrates, it was the unexamined life that was not worth living. In America, we are guilty of too much examination – of our feelings, our relationships, our parenthood, our tastes and our entitlements – even our TV shows are over-analyzed as the media attack of Downton Abbeyitis will attest.

More significantly, American society is beset by a plague of unaccountability across the board. At the highest financial echelons, it manifests itself in bonuses, golden parachutes and government bailouts for people who rightfully should have been fired and/or prosecuted.  Educationally, it’s a case of bureaucracy clogging the public school system so that ineffective teachers and uncontrollable students can’t be expelled. It’s also a case of administrators and principals not being axed when known pedophiles are transferred from one school to another.   Chancellor Walcott has just promised to fire the teachers and aides who perpetrated these crimes – he said nothing about the enablers who facilitated them. Most significantly, from the perspective of drastic changes to our mores and values, has been the steady rise of single motherhood among women under thirty. Today 53% of children born to women in this age group are illegitimate.

We just witnessed the brouhaha over one non-profit’s decision to cut off aid to Planned Parenthood and its subsequent reversal under public pressure. We’ve also seen the fracas over the decision to force church-run institutions to provide insurance benefits for birth control and its retraction. The conventional wisdom is that we need to make birth control less expensive and more available. Yet it would seem that young women are not having babies because they can’t afford their own contraception or the purchase of condoms – both are less expensive than the cost of a movie and a bag of popcorn, much less a pair of cool sneakers.

They and their partners are having babies because they’re indifferent to the consequences of this enormous step. Some of the women interviewed in the Times article of Feb 18^th, described their pregnancies as unplanned, a by-product of casual relationships or sex with men who already have other children to whom they pay no attention or support. Most of the statistical rise comes from couples who live together without marriage – only 43% of women with a high school diploma or less get married compared with 92% of women with college degrees.

Not only have we de-stigmatized illegitimacy – we have increased government benefits to those who choose it as a lifestyle.   In other words, we have removed the sine qua non of responsible behavior – planning for what you can afford – i.e., accountability.  We have also glamorized non-marriage as a racier, more interesting way to live. Angelina Jolie will soon have 8 children without marriage – something of no consequence to a very wealthy movie star, but something sending a clear message to young girls who look up to her as a role model. Numerous other celebrities flaunt their unmarried parenthod as a statement of disdain for the bourgeoisie.

In the dark ages before television, such behavior existed but wasn’t popularized by wide exposure; we now live in an age of instant contagion where fads are spread within minutes, not weeks.    This means that when we celebrate and reward athletes who brag about their rampant impregnations of young women, we are espousing values that have the severest consequences to our children. An activist like Susan Sarandon (the unmarried mother of 3) should understand that most of the problems of the bottom 99% have to do with the plight of children of the 53% (73% among Blacks) of unmarried mothers whose financial dependency on society is an ongoing, rising problem with no easy solution.

For years doctors believed that ulcers were caused by stress until it was proved that bacteria were the actual culprit. For years, we have been pretending that poverty is the cause of illegitimacy when in fact the equation works in the reverse. By infantilizing women who choose not to worry about planning their pregnancies, by refusing to address the harsh realities that accrue to children born illegitimately, by treating marriage as an option instead of a requirement, we have escalated the damage done to our fraying social fabric.

Instead of glamorous celebrities toting their children through the pages of our magazines, we need Judge Judy to remind us that we don’t “get pregnant,” we create a pregnancy. Sometimes this happens by accident but remedies are legally available. For those whose conscience doesn’t allow for those remedies, there’s the obvious option of not participating in behavior that might lead to such accidents. Judge Judy needs to yell at all of us – those who treat the government as their substitute for the wedded father of their children and the rest of us who continue to dutifully pay our taxes to support a large share of the 53% of young women and their partners who refuse to be accountable for themselves and their children.