Great news for Anonymous and the creep in Gauntlets' grocery line

Apparently all the ethical women of the world have taken care of the population sitch, and now you jerks who buy clothes at Target are the problem.

Open letter

Accomplishing nothing, CSPP style

Dear Everyone Else,

You have your reasons, a million different things ranging from passionate intensity to a lack of all conviction. You look to like, if looking liking move; and when it doesn’t, well then the First Amendment paves your tongue’s way and if you have a right to your mind then surely I have a right to it, too.  

But listen here: There is something wrong with a man who would follow a woman into check-out lane number nine just to tell her—loudly, persistently, and in front of the sentient recipients of his scorn—that children are scum. (I’m looking at you, squashy dude with that archipelago of warts floating on your wind-whipped face. Why? You looked into those aeviternal baby eyes, and failed to see that it is Life who animates them? That sneer was like nothing I’ve ever seen before. If the sweetest things turn sourest by their deeds, then what is to become of you?)

Don’t be that guy, dear Everyone Else. I get that you're you, but don’t be that guy. Wrinkle your brow or curl your lip. Mutter to your companion words like “disgusting” and “irresponsible,” just loudly enough for me to hear. Glower at my back. Be rude, if you like. Charge me more. Whatever. The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and we’re used to it by now.

But try. Affect the likeness of Man. Don’t ever speak your invectives to my children’s faces, ever again.  

All the best.

Me 

One for the Green Police

It’s been awhile since we hit the theme of how the hard-core environmentalists have it all wrong when it comes to kids. A few random observations on the topic:

1) Kids are hardwired to reduce, reuse, and recycle. If I want to throw anything, and I mean anything, away, I have to do it surreptitiously or else face the chorus of “Oh! Let’s save that for a craft!”


2) The toddler never throws any one thing in the garbage without taking at least two things out.

3) I don’t know much about Dr. Anderson, but my heart was gladdened to read this and to know that there’s at least one OB/GYN out there who not only gets it, but has the courage to speak up. May the good doctor enjoy eternity in the good company of souls who might not have existed but for his vocational faithfulness.

Eating greens is a special treat

Even if I weren't conscience-bound by catholicity and all that, it would be worth it to generate my own busload of humans just to tick off environmentalists.

Dig in, kids!

The politics of multiparity

A woman pregnant with her first baby is radiant, beautiful, adorable.

A woman pregnant with her second baby is matronly, serene, not disrespectable.

A woman pregnant with her third baby is a trouper, pitiable. We're glad for her that she's about to be put out to pasture.

A woman pregnant with her fourth+ baby is a sow. A breeder. A glutton. An abuser of the environment. Pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and childrearing are obviously not difficult for her or she'd have quit by now like any sane, unselfish, thinking person. All she's doing is, as I heard it described on Talk of the Nation a few weeks ago, "pop[ping] out puppies," and she needs to be publicly derided for it. (Thanks, Russ in Kansas City--your insights on Christianity were strikingly original. And Ira, the ideological balance of calls you accept on the show is a fine reflection of your journalistic integrity).

More environment, please! Oink oink oink.

Female circumcision motivated by religious belief? Hey, who are we to judge (at least in certain times and places; find on this page "genital mutilation")? The tiny minority of adherents to catholic doctrine who take babies as God gives them (which only sometimes means a lot)? Christianist militant nut jobs, and stupid to boot.

Playing chicken with my conscience

Rebekah’s post on her new, green-glam shopping bag sparked some sort of reaction in the random firing of neurons that passes for postpartum thought, resulting in me recalling a statement from Rod Dreher’s Crunchy Cons:

“Cheap chicken is not worth a compromised conscience.”

Obviously, he was stumping for chicken rights: Buy free-range, organic chickens, preferably purchased from local farmers, rather than the ones that lived what were undoubtedly nasty, brutish, short, and unnatural lives before ending up in Hy-Vee’s cooler case.

Now, it’s been awhile since I read the book, but I recall it as compelling. Life-changing, even. But some of his arguments caused me significant angst, which I could not resolve to my satisfaction and therefore dealt with through the ever-healthy psychological technique of repression. Well, not quite. But it’s true that I wasn’t quite sure what to do with some of the information, and with cheap chicken hanging on my conscience, I thought maybe y’all could help me out here.

More particularly, the crunchy lifestyle Dreher so passionately and (to me) convincingly advocates seems inevitably to collide with the CSPP gig, particularly for those of us raising families on one more-or-less fixed income. I can’t speak definitively about his position on this, but the gist as I perceived it was that although humans are indeed foremost among God’s creation, stewardship means that concern for creation might limit family size to the point where you can afford to live in a responsibly crunchy way. So: what’s a good response to this?

Again, I’m remembering this through a haze of time and hormones (postpartum as well as those ingested from all the nonorganic food I’ve consumed), so I can’t recall precisely why I found this so compelling—but he makes a good case, and I think there is a tension here.

But for now, if you see a store advertising the 79-cents-a-pound sale on chicken, you'll find me there, buying one for the week and one for the freezer.

I know this general topic has more or less been kicked around on this blog before, and I’m resigned to, as usual, doing what we can with what we’ve got. But that cheap chicken suddenly got heavy around my neck again when I recalled the Dreher quote…

‘God save thee, ancient Mariner,
From the fiends that plague thee thus! -
Why look'st thou so?' -"With my crossbow
I shot the Albatross.”

-and-

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

Little Carbon Footprints (ct'd)

In her editorial "Nature-nurturer: Survival of the stupidest," Kathleen Parker reacts to the story Rebekah so alertly recently blogged.

Excerpted:

"Raising children is quantifiably the most persistently unselfish act known to mankind, as millions of veterans of sleepless nights will attest. Parenthood is when "I" takes a backseat to "thou" -- when the infant-self submits to adulthood so that the real infant gets a necessary turn at the well of self-importance.

"Although I doubt there are many willing to sterilize themselves in order to reduce the size of their carbon footprint, such extreme materialism is the evolutionary product of our gradual commodification of human life.

"Suddenly, the unborn are of no greater importance than the contents of our recycling bin. Like WeightWatchers dieters substituting carbs for sugars, we trade off future members of the human race to neutralize insults to Earth's balance in the present.

"Is this the slippery slope that pro-lifers prophesied? Once such utilitarian concerns edge out our humanity -- and once human life is deemed to have no greater value than any other life form -- how long before we begin tidying up other inconveniences?

"Wouldn't it be helpful to eliminate some of the less productive members of society who, like the cows they no doubt eat, are emitting hazardous methane, one of the greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming?

"That seems an absurd projection, but then not long ago, so did the aborting of babies to thwart global warming. The deeply caring, meanwhile, are always the ones to watch. Tenderness, it has been said, leads to the gas chambers."

For the full editorial, click here.

The pitter-patter of little carbon footprints

We all amuse ourselves by saying that those of us who have babies are going to outbreed those who don't and take over. But this has been the case for all of history and the reality is that whatever crazy people have money end up in charge. So although this crazy person isn't going to have kids, I'm still scared about the world my kids are going to grow up in because of people like her. When people buy into faith-based initiatives like global warming, what's to stop them from, say, imposing penalties on couples who exceed environmentally-safe numbers of children a generation from now? Will we get a religious exemption, or will the "scientific" principles behind the religion of environmentalism be too urgent to allow for other beliefs? But I do get a kick out of her perceived persecution for the life she's chosen. Cute how she thinks she's in the minority and I think I am.

On living with a dude who kills things

Someone from church offered us a free turkey today. The catch is, it's alive. Dad is out looking for an ax to borrow so that he can do away with, pluck, and clean the doomed creature for us to eat the day after tomorrow.

There was a time when I would have gotten snotty about this kind of barbarian behavior. But since we moved here and hunting has become a major part of our lives, I've gotten a real education. Two years in a row now we've gotten 60 pounds of meat for the price of equipment (acquired on the cheap) and a hunting license. My husband goes out for a day or two and somehow turns a live deer into nice, neat, paper-wrapped roasts and tenderloins in my freezer, and over the course of the year grinds and seasons the rest of it into bulk Italian sausage. He does all the work himself; nothing goes through a locker (his dad is a meat cutter and taught him the trade). Frankly, I wish I had some skill that would impress him as much as all this impresses me. Needless to say, this saves us LOTS of money, and also helps keep the local deer population under control. It's much more humane than what happens to animals on a killing floor, and more energy efficient than commercial meat production. Liberals have no idea how green rednecks are.

This is icky, bloody, stinky work that most people in our antiseptic society don't have the stomach for, and thus get high and mighty about not doing. How ridiculous for anyone who isn't a vegetarian. It takes a lot more integrity to harvest your own meat than it does to pick it up off a shelf. Don't get me wrong, I still pick up my fair share off a shelf. But I'm glad that it's 60 pounds and a turkey or two less than I would normally be buying.

(Note: we don't feed game to guests, since we know a lot of people are squeamish about it. Eat here without fear.)