It
was raining when I got on the van yesterday morning. The new commute routine
doesn’t leave room for the paper until the evening, so it was a fellow
vanpooler, fond of reading aloud the bad news headlines, who brought me the story
of the woman who killed her four children. *Killed her own children.*
How
do you greet news like that? With a fit of sobbing? Or duck and cover-- let the fact fly off into
the white noise of worldwide human suffering. Last night, when I Googled “mother kills children”, I was disturbed to read that
filicide, as it is called, is not such a rare event. Poverty-induced despair
seemed to be the leading motivator.
Sure,
there were times when one of my little buggers drove me to thoughts of filicide
– isn’t that part of growing up? But the line between thinking it and doing it was
always as wide as the world. I, like most parents, would not hesitate to give
up my*own* life to save my kids. If this kind of devotion to our offspring wasn’t
in our genetic coding, the human species would have vanished long, long ago.
This
morning, my news reader announced “Study warns overfishing
risks ‘global collapse.’” Unfortunately, the biggest threat to children today
is not like the threats that shaped our genes. Our little ones aren’t getting chased
by saber-toothed tigers. When humans created agriculture, technology, and
armies, we created a new enemy: us. I don’t need to list the dangers; you know them
well enough. But it’s precisely because these global hazards are,
evolutionarily speaking, new, we are still learning
how to respond to them. One little girl falls in a well, and an entire nation
gets involved. But when an entire generation of children – really, all future
generations – are put at risk by war and ecotastrophe,
far too many adults, especially those in power, become *de facto* filicidal.
Heck,
forget about future disasters. This February, UNICEF Canada reported that “a
staggering 29,000 children under age five still die each day from preventable
causes worldwide.” That’s a September 11 every 2 1/2 hours, every day, every
year… a pre-school Polly every three seconds… all dead from preventable
pneumonia, diarrheal diseases, measles, and malaria.
Yet we let our government spend
$200
million per day in Iraq for what our President has finally come around to
admitting: cheap oil. Shame on us!
It’s
ironic that the global threat has produced a new threat to unborn children: the
fear of procreation. A forty year old environmentalist co-worker had told me
that he and his wife had chosen to be childless, not wanting to subject an
innocent life to a potentially nightmarish future. I had the same feelings a
third of a century ago. But hope is a potent force for survival, and giving
birth to a baby (or adopting one) can be powerful affirmation of the future. Something
moved my friend and me to make that commitment, to extend our investment in
this world by at least another quarter century.
Those
little troublemakers bring with them a powerful self-preservation
mechanism. My newly-dad co-worker writes:
“I thought that the greatest sights I have ever seen were things like the
streets of Greenwich Village all covered in snow, or the limestone karsts of Ha
Long Bay in North Vietnam, or the Okavango Delta in Botswana. Little did I
realize that those vistas would be surpassed by something as simple as my baby
taking a nap with my wife on a sunny afternoon.”
And
so we protect our investment. I set up lunch with another co-worker, my
daughter’s age, to plan for an office-wide environmental program. “Why not the
whole building?” he asked, warming my heart. On the way home, my vanpool buddy
told me how that day he suggested global warming should be part of the
strategic planning for his agency. He said “a light went on” with one of the
senior planners, who heartily agreed. “I have two children…” she said.
Fellow
adults, in this day and age, we all have 2 billion children. Every one of them deserves
a long, healthy, and happy life. Ensuring that is up to us.