Children have got to be the most selfish creatures with which God chose to infest his good Earth. Everything is about THEM. "I'm hungry!" "I shit myself without thinking things through and now I'm uncomfortable." FIX IT!" "I want you to hold me!" "I'm just crying to piss you off!" Not only does a baby believe that other people exist only for its own benefit, it believes that other people exist only in its presence. What egomaniacs! I'd rather deal have with the Fuehrer!
Like I'd want to get up in the middle of the night to deal with a ten-pound weakling of a dictator at my house. I pay the bills; I make the rules. If you don't like them move out. My rules include, if you wake up after midnight and before dawn and it is not an emergency (fire, flood, Armageddon, heart attack, etc.), keep it to yourself. They can't vote and they don't have any money to bribe the Demoncrats in congress, but the ungrateful little parasites have manipulated the legal system and public perception with disturbing efficiency. If my neighbor wakes me up in the middle of the night by making too much noise, I could have him arrested so I can go back to sleep. If my Joyful Bundle of Liability (JBL) wakes me up in the middle of the night by making too much noise, I could be arrested FOR going back to sleep. This isn't a child neglect issue; it's a sleep neglect issue. The 13th Amendment freed the black slaves so they no longer had to obey every whim of their oppressive masters. Obviously the amendment wasn't well written because the whim of a JBL still carries the full weight of the law.
Offspring are a terrible investment. They are brought into the world at great expense and terrible pain and while their capacity to wreak mayhem increases as they grow, their restraint does not. A child is a walking, talking, ticking time bomb of liability. It could set fire to your house, crash your car into a retirement center, trample your prize winning azaleas, or worse yet, accuse you of any number of crimes for which you are automatically guilty when your actual offense was only agreeing to buy only two scoops of ice cream at Baskin Robin's instead three. These aren't the children Lex Luthor had with Catwoman, they're the norm. If a family were run like a corporation, any CEO who suggested such a risky investment attached to nearly limitless liability and imminent threat of extraneous lawsuits and possible incarceration would be not only fired on the spot by the shareholders, but also beaten to death. Perhaps this vigilance in protecting their own interests is why major corporations tend to stay in business for hundreds of years while more than half of US marriages end in ruination in less than ten. This is despite the fact that shareholders have limited liability and therefore LESS disincentive to pursue a risky long shot than the would-be parents of a Pint-Sized Miscreant (PSM).
Children defeat the purpose of getting married. In theory, a couple gets married because they desire to spend the rest of their lives together. There are other reasons (She's already pregnant, she wants to steal half of his money, he wants to steal half of HER money, etc) but I maintain that none these are not the reason behind the institution of marriage, they are corruptions. Should you have children, "together" will be reduced to a technicality in that you will live under the same roof, but may only see each other passing in the hallway as your spouse chases after the two year-old who has removed his own diaper and is now running across the new carpet and shitting, while you run the other way trying to catch and extinguish the cat whom your other child has somehow set aflame. You, might get to actually spend some time with your spouse after your children grow up and move out, but by that time, it will be too late to do any good. You'll just barely have time to flash each other a toothless smile before you both run off to change your Depends. That's not really what I have in mind when I think about tying the knot with the love of my life. Admittedly, married life may not be the fairy tale it's sometimes hyped up to be, but with children, it looks like a fairy tale written by The Brothers Grimm.
Right now I'm sure someone is out there thinking, "Oh, but they're so cute!" The same argument was used a generation ago to justify the purchase of countless baby alligators. As they grew up, the cuteness wore off and a number of the alligators went on to eat their masters. Along the way they wreaked shocking amounts of property damage, devoured other pets, permanently maimed hundreds of people, and created a legal nightmare when they did those things to people other than their owners. Following the destruction, a number of new laws were passed. You can't buy a baby alligator at the pet store in the mall and keep it in your bathtub anymore. Now alligators are only kept in zoos where there are precautions taken to make sure they can't hurt anyone. This proves that we really do have a working self-preservation instinct. We really can look past cuteness to see the real threat to life, limb, and lifestyle on some occasions. Why can't we do it with children? Is it because it's easier to look at one and say, "oh look, it has my eyes and your nose," than to say, "oh look, it has my predisposition towards arson and your co-dependency"? We get hung up on that kind of crap. Smell the coffee and then run for your life. Godzilla is coming and he has "my eyes and your nose".
(1/16/2002) |
