I no longer “get” having children.

Why would anyone want to have a child today.

I do not mean to be critical. I am just asking the question.

Whenever I articulate this to my friends, people look at me with a mix of horror and disgust.

What is wrong with me. Of course, people want to have children today. That is how it has always been.

My own “having children” was several decades ago. At that time, things were different. Some scientists did talk about global warning. Not many. No one took it seriously.

Democracy and freedom would last forever.

The flower children would not become the yuppies because no one had ever heard the word yuppie.

From the perspective of someone who takes care of other people’s children, and let’s be real, these are adults who have failed themselves, let alone their children, some are in prison, some have created a prison within themselves, I just don’t get how anyone would bring a child into this world as it exists today.

From what I see, ninety-nine percent of life on the planet is a nightmare. Dystopia is not a theory. It is the status quo.

Steven Pinker does not agree with me.

But Steven is a privileged white male at a privileged, white, ivy league, university that teaches the children of the top one percent. His POV is pie in the sky, unleashed optimism, and he appears to have the numbers. Less war. Whatever.

But what I see is a culture in decline that is defined by an average life span that is slipping down. Not up.

Writers in the New York Times are always talking about how great it is that they get to see their children grow up.

Yet I feel a sense of anxiety among them.

Reality. The New York Times is published for the average college-educated white mommy and daddy who live on Long Island where they can pretend that the problems of the world do not mean them.

Because they don’t mean them.

Even as the heat waves spread.

Crank up the AC.

Sometimes, I look at the kids I work with and wonder where they came from. How will they survive the future.

They won’t.

Most of them – boys at-risk – will be dead in a couple of years. Their survivability is limited. I am not convinced this is a bad thing. Why would they want to continue living in a culture that is indifferent to them, and is going to view them as liabilities.

People see them as liabilities now.

They live in a world of pain.

Americans are having fewer and fewer children even as their own life expectancy goes down the rabbit hole.

Perhaps there is hope in that.