I'm going to try and gather some stuff to read every Monday about the M.A.Y.A. Years or whatever is of interest. Thank you to those who have already taken a look at this site. If you have any ideas, give a shout.
1. I can't believe it's already been 5 years since 9/11. I was watching the 9/11 documentary on CBS last night with my dad, and even though I saw it 4 years ago, it still was disturbing. I was a senior in college when the towers fell. My roommate Jerry, who was an exchange student from South Korea, ran into our room saying, "New York is on fire!" But I thought he said "the house is on fire!" So as I ran out the door, I caught my other roomies looking at the TV.
I would think about my stepmom's relatives that lived in D.C., as well as Jeff and Melanie, family friends that were working at the Department of Commerce at the time. Fortunately, they weren't hurt, but it seems the degrees of separation between a friend and someone who died are too small. In fact, a little bit of all of us died that day...at least a little bit of me did.
I have saved a copy of the special edition of Time Magazine, plus the L.A. Times Commemorative Edition to show my children when they learn about the event in school. I hope to teach them the realities of ideas and ideologies; how the freedom and right to express-and live-an idea goes both ways. I hope my children understand the preciousness of life, and how fleeting it really is. And I hope they never forget that the opposite of faith isn't doubt, but rather fear and certainty. I hope I never forget that.
2. An op-ed piece by Meghan Daum in the L.A. Times that ran over the weekend was of great interest. Commenting on a study that found that fathers over the age of 40 were six times as likely to create autistic children as fathers under 30. This gets to the heart of the matter:
"The real lesson behind this study may not be much different from that old maxim about having a child, which is that there's never a right time to do it. Biologically speaking, we're probably best off reproducing in our early 20s, but the economic and social realities of the last 30 years or so have more or less conspired to make that a pretty bad idea. Unless you happen to be Reese Witherspoon, young parenthood often correlates with higher rates of poverty, not to mention disenfranchisement from the cultural phenomenon of child-as-middle-age-status-symbol. If "Mommy Wars"-type literary anthologies and blogs such as urbanbaby.com are any indication, parenthood is not for the young but for over-mortgaged elites who debate the merits of sign language for babies as though it were an international policy issue.
But what about the 30s? That's no time to have kids either, especially if you're a middle-class professional who feels compelled to put in 60 hours a week to gain the economic status increasingly necessary to support a family. In households in which both partners are working, changing diapers while trying to make law partner can quickly devolve into a situation resembling hell.
That leaves the 40s, which would be a fine time to start having kids if it weren't for the fact that many women can't get pregnant at that point at least not without the help of expensive reproductive technologies. Many men, of course, have been wise to this for years, often waiting until they're prosperous and middle-aged to begin having children with the kind of younger women who either don't want to make law partner or are willing to spend their husband's money on nannies while forging their own corporate ascents."
Here's the link to the article:
Enjoy and discuss!
No comments:
Post a Comment