Someone shot up the place at Virginia Tech. It's serious - many were killed. Way many, which in itself is weird and makes you wonder about logistics.
I know VA Tech a little. My cousins went there - one even lived in Ambler Johnson, the freshman dorm where the first two children were killed. It's in Blacksburg, idyllic little town, but it's also a competitive tech school, like Cornell or Carnegie Mellon. When I was at CWRU I was always a little worried about what the school was doing to those poor mental Casies, who had to work all day and night just to not fall behind in class.
Maybe not the place to be when your girlfriend dumps you, or you just don't understand the next set of equations, or when you wake up and it's raining, when the wind shows you malice and caprice and talks to you like your favorite demon.
My children will never be safe. Hell, I know that. I'll never be safe either. Getting out of the third trimester was an achievement, getting past 7 months also. Getting them out of high school and into college, man you can see how a parent might want to think, "Ah, now he's safe." He's gone off to live with his social and intellectual peers. They drink on campus there instead of getting into cars. It's elitist, self-deluding thinking, but you can come up with a lot of insane, ugly shit sometimes just to gain a little peace.
If one of my packages of care, time, and intent, one of my two bales of thought, education and love, were destroyed by some kid who woke up one morning and heard the wind laughing at him like bullies in the cafeteria - it would cut me down. But there's nothing I can do about that.
What makes my heart vomit is the thought of being that kid's mom. He's been in pain for years and she never knew a way to help him out of it. How do we fail them?
THAT'S why I can't have children. Even if they don't get killed by a psychopath, they could turn out to BE the psychopath. I could handle neither of those situations, and the fact that neither is really likely doesn't make having children worth it.
ReplyDeleteOh, yeah. Being that kid's mom is hell.
ReplyDeleteBut I have to say to James: it's the argument to have kids. If all the losers and freaks and idiots are the only ones making babies, and all the smart ones are staying away from that out of fear or anything else, we're building a world that is only made of the offspring of losers and freaks. I guess if you have no kids, you don't have to worry about your kids' future. But you do have to worry about your own. At least for a little while.
Unfortunately, it makes us all fearful of what could be. The reality, which isn't nearly as dramatic, is that hundreds of millions of kids wake up and go to sleep without incident every day. Millions of college students attend classes at hundreds, thousands of universities. Fewer than fifty kids at one university at one time lost their lives.
Remember: it's on the news because it's the rare tragic incident, not because things like this happen every day.
Thanks for your post and an especially poetic paragraph about the killer.
Well Jaime at some point you realize that your parents are saner than your grandparents were, and you are saner than your mom (you are), so likely if you had kids they would be even saner than you... but really, it's just one of the objections to consider.
ReplyDeleteYou could come up with dozens more.
Indeed I could. And I have.
ReplyDeleteAnd of course I've heard (and understand and kind of even agree with) the argument that the "normal," smart, socially responsible people are the ones who SHOULD be having kids when they are the ones having the fewest if any.