Babies to the Rescue!
Why I never thought of children as a burden on the planet, and why I now worry that we aren't having enough of them. Plus a tribute to a great dinerman.
I always wanted kids. Just not right away. The thought of starting a family in my early twenties was incomprehensible to me. Instead, I targeted my early thirties, just enough time to get a career going and build up some financial security. Then, stupid me, I started a business instead. That’s the short version.
Despite this, it never occurred to me to forgo fatherhood. I looked forward to raising little Garbins and teaching them all I knew, while guiding their transition into productive individuals. I shrugged off anyone rejecting parenthood for reasons other than doubts about their aptitude for parenthood. Not everyone should be parents. It’s a hard job with tremendous responsibilities.
I no longer shrug it off. This notion of babies being bad for the planet has evolved into a pernicious ideology, and last weekend it revealed itself to me first-hand. At a gathering, a friend told me that her daughter, a beautiful and successful thirty-something woman, didn’t believe it was right to bring children into this world. The daughter cited a confrontation with a stranger on a New York subway as one of the reasons for her decision and a Supreme Court decision as another. The world is crazy, she reasoned. Why bring more children into it?
The story stung me to sadness. At one time, I might have empathized. Now, I can’t. I have a daughter, and I look back on her birth as the happiest moment of my life — just nudging out the “I do” I said to my wife the year before. The experience clarified my very existence and gave it meaning far beyond any of my other accomplishments.
But what could I say to my friend? These are deeply personal decisions, and should stay so, but I ask we don’t make them fallaciously. New York isn’t the world. New York is its own world. And second, if the world is so broken, how then to explain so much global prosperity compared to a century ago when the population was a quarter of today’s? If we are on the edge of dystopia, why then have we experienced so much human advancement?
Fear the fear
For anyone looking for hope beyond the drumbeat of fear that hammers away at our perception of the world, I give you Dr. Stephen Barrows of the Acton Institute who reminds us that, “Ingenuity is overcoming the law of diminishing returns.” As a woodworker, I experience this every time I work on a project. The faster I build that birdhouse and by using fewer resources, whether it is wood, paint, hardware, or time, the happier it makes me. If I run a business from it, the more money I might make.
Think about all the tools, gear, and consumables — the trees saved, the fuel not used for delivery, the power not supplied to printing presses — all replaced by the smartphone you hold in your hand.
I never feared the future, but I do fear the spread of fear people try to instill in us. I’ve lost count of the number of extinction events threatening humanity just in my lifetime. Soon after my birth came the Cuban missile crisis, then Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the threat of ecological collapse from the use of pesticides (false). Then came pollution, air and water (addressed), the ozone hole (closed), nuclear waste (addressed), Y2K (addressed), acid rain (abated), and the threat of course nuclear war (still there, but greatly diminished). Let’s not forget killer bees, the Jupiter effect, superbugs, murder hornets, high-tension line cancers, and others too numerous to fit into this article.
Even the threat of overpopulation, as Paul Ehrlich described in his 1968 book, The Population Bomb, has been debunked many times. Yet even at 91 years old, the media continues to trot out him and his doomsday message, four billion additional people later. Why? Because fear sells.
The 1990s gave us a nice respite until Al Gore pooped the party with the specter of global warming, now rebranded as climate change. Change is what climate has done for billions of years, but are we causing it? Do we stop it, or do we adapt? I think we can adapt, but is it an emergency? Let’s just say I have my doubts.
Given all the other crises we’ve survived or managed, I worry little about it. We too often forget that no one can predict the future with any accuracy, and personal experience tells me that alarmist prognostications rarely turn out as good or as bad as they say — if they happen at all.
If my friend’s daughter spoke to me directly about this, I would impress upon her the certainty that we as a species have tremendous capacity to fix things — especially those things we broke in the first place. This explains why we sit on the top of the food chain. We don’t just stand around and let things fall down on us. More people means more brains — the greatest tool in any toolbox — which the best of us use to invent solutions to make all our lives better. We just have to let them.
Finally, I’d ask her, “What if one of those inventors is a future child of yours?” Will you deny humanity that chance?
John Evangelista, Dinerman Extraordinaire
The Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported recently the sad news of John Evangelista’s passing. John ran the Parkway Diner in Worcester for decades, starting the business with his three brothers, sticking with it for years after they all passed on before him. He was 94.
I had the good fortune of watching the great show he put on behind the counter of the tiny Worcester Lunch Car many times during the nine years I lived in that city. I loved many things about the Parkway, but just having a conversation with John sat atop that list.
My earliest memory of those visits date from the time I apartment hunted in the city, where I stopped in for a meatball sandwich and a chance to chat about the neighborhoods. John told me more about the city than I could learn reading a week’s worth of Telegrams. I’ve often said that good diners help make good neighborhoods, and I say it with John in mind.
I’m happy to read that John seemed to enjoy a lengthy retirement, because I heard too many stories of about these guys who worked day in and day out behind the counters. When they finally retired, either through necessity or by some intense familial persuasion, some didn’t adapt well.
The Telegram’s obit reports that he may have retired, but he didn’t stay away. John remained a presence in the place, greeting customers, sharing stories, and making everyone feel like family.
Thanks for the nourishment, John. Culinary and otherwise.
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Adapt. Overcome. Improvise.
Randy, Great writing beginning with the Fearful and Vain and ending with how Good humanity truly can be when we Look for it and acknowledge it right there beside us in our neighborhood.