The Adventures of Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid

Before I get into the tale at hand, I suppose it bears mentioning how this post received its title. In the days before Owen was born, Clara and I were watching the prior seasons of Parks and Rec on Netflix in the evenings. On the night before he was born we watched it for hours as Clara started laboring. Anyway, one of the characters on the show, Andy, has a band that has had numerous names over the course of the show’s run, one of which was Mouserat (my other favorite was Fourskin, which became Threeskin when they lost a member, so to speak). When Owen was a few weeks old I took to calling him Mouserat. Clara loathed the name at the time, but my mom, who was staying with us, found it very cute and that was all the encouragement that I needed. From that day on he has been the Mouserat Kid. Clara has since come around. 

At the time I also thought it would be funny to write a series of tales about infant Owen as one of the most feared trainrobbers in the world. Since the Mouserat Kid sounded like a good name for a trainrobber, I needed an appellation for myself that would fit the nefariousness of our deeds. Hence, Toby Loco. Though, in one of the twists of the tales, it would turn out that Owen was going to be the crazy one in our gang who was quick to shoot. He was to be loved by women and feared by Pinkertons. I have yet to write the first story. But whenever we head out for adventure, I think of our duo as Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid. 

Which brings us to the story at hand. There are precious few chances for adventure in this world when you are 21 months old and live in central Kansas. Though, I suppose, conceived from a different, more Chestertonian angle, everything is adventurous when you are 21 months old. But this past weekend, wanderlust got us and we were out the door. Clara works nights at the hospital here in town and the creaky floorboards of our World War I era house necessitate that Owen and I vacate in the mornings so Mama can sleep. This week’s destination was Kanopolis State Park, about 45 minutes southwest of where we live.  

It had rained a good chunk of the day on Friday and when we woke up Saturday morning it was misting still. Clara was a bit surprised that we were carrying on with my idea to go walk several miles through prairie grass in the rain, but the weather was warmish and not windy, the latter condition a virtual once-in-a-spring type day in this part of the country and I figured if we got too wet we could just hoof it back to the car in double time. Owen likes it when I run with him on my back and I had no other ideas for what to do to kill several hours on a Saturday morning in Salina, Kansas. So off we went. 

I had known the lake was there—a friend had done a triathlon there last summer—but I had not known that there were 29 miles of trails in the park surrounding the lake. We went to an event in town called Discover Salina Naturally, which is conservative state parlance for Earth Day celebration. (We talked to one of the event organizers who said that when it was called Earth Day no one wanted to come because they assumed it was some liberal hug-a-tree festival.) There was a ranger there from Kanopolis who gave us a brochure and I was hooked. Trails are a rarity in this part of the world, and hills perhaps even more conspicuous, but this place was reported to have both. 

We got there and the mist was clearing, but it was still cloudy. I was the first car in the parking lot for the trailhead, and for all I knew given the remoteness of the park, we would be the only people there that day. The start was somewhat ominous. The trail was wet and slick. It started by turning into the heart of a canyon. Lining the walls, like something out of an old Western, were swarms of vultures keeping watch on us, waiting for a fall. Some were flying. Owen, charitably, calls them hawks when they fly. I wondered briefly if a vulture had ever lifted child out of his father’s backpack. We climbed up out of the canyon, quite literally hand over foot. It was a tricky maneuver with 40 pounds on my back, especially since 30 pounds of the weight belonged to a young fellow I am increasingly fond of.  

We topped out on a ridge and from there began a 5 mile stretch of descending into and climbing out of canyons cut by the tributaries feeding the lake. At one point I slipped in the mud and fell backward, landing on my poor son. He took it pretty well, but I figured I better compensate him with his pacifier. He gladly accepted and then tucked his head into the back of my neck and fell asleep as I sang him old hymns.  

The hike was gorgeous. I had no idea central Kansas got this beautiful. There is a great line in the beginning of Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s novel, where the narrator’s father watches a sunset in central Kansas, at the gravesite of his father, and reflects on how wonderful it is to know that every place can be beautiful. I felt a bit like that. But the spirit of the line in the book is a comparative beauty. As in, compared to how bad this place sucks, this sunset redeems the despair a bit. But this would be beautiful by any standards. A herd (pack, flock, gander?) of turkeys was running across the open plains. Everything was washed in green from all of the moisture we have been getting. Trees were starting to blossom, the grass smelled sweet. The creeks swelled in newfound vigor. Cardinals and robins and mockingbirds flitted around. It was majestic. 

I knew I was pushing it timewise with Owen, so when a trail split off and took a fairly direct path back to the trailhead I took it. He woke up right about then and asked for his mama. I told him she would be awake when we got home and asked him what we would do to her. "Kiss." Smart kid.  

The path we turned on to was more directly intended for equestrian use rather than human and the upkeep reflected that. The trail was wider, but it was also soft, red dirt. The days of rain had turned it into sticky clay. We crested a ridge and I could see my car. Not hardly a quarter of a mile away as the crow flies. But as hikers everywhere know, crow distance means little. I saw a stream crossing up ahead, imagining it would be like the half dozen others I had already crossed throughout the morning. I walked up to it and found out I was wrong. Very wrong. This was closer to the lake and definitely deeper. How deep I could only guess given the murky quality of the water. I assumed there must be a crossing somewhere and went to walk down the shore a bit to spy it out. Stepping out of the water, I slipped on the mud and fell right on to a reed sticking up out of the ground. My first concern was for Owen who, after all, was attached to my back. I took off my pack to check on him and he was fine, though somehow he had lost a shoe. I put it back on him and tucked his blanket around him and then noticed a searing pain in, how shall we phrase this, the left side of my primary gluteal muscle. I did a quick hand check and came back with blood all over my fingers. My shorts were ripped and there was blood dripping down my leg and (and!) there was no other way to cross the stream than to go straight through it. I put Owen back on my back and walked down the stream each way, but there was no getting around it. It was either go through or go back the way I had just come: 6 or so miles with blood dripping out of what I could only assume was a deep puncture wound on my ass.  

I broke a reed out of the ground to use to prod the ground in front of me as I crossed, hoping it would signal me to any sudden dropoffs. And I set out. Now, let me say that this crossing on almost any other occasion would not be a big deal. If I was by myself at the end of a trail run I would happily have jumped in and swam across. But I had 40 pounds of kid and snacks on my back, making it pretty hard to swim if the water ended up being deeper than walking height. I considered dropping Owen again and walking it alone to test the depth, but I figured he would freak out if I left him in his pack and took off. The water burned in my wound as it came up above my navel. I was trying to keep Owen dry with one hand while prodding with the stick in another. Comical, I imagine. It didn't take long to cross, maybe a minute, but my lips were trembling the entire time. And not just because the water was freezing, though it was. I came up the other side and shook off like a dog. I checked Owen and his shoes were wet. Once he figured this out he gave a characteristic one word response: "Home." Again, smart boy. 

We headed back toward the car and I looked at my trail map which showed one more water crossing before the end. I thought, or hoped, that it would be another small one, but alas that was not to be the case. We had one final stream crossing to make, this time with an audience. Another one of the trails, the one we had started the day on, skirts the other side of this stream before turning away from it and there was a Boy Scout troop and a woman hiking by herself. She saw us coming to this stream and came down to see if she could offer any help. It was a sweet gesture, but I am not sure what she thought she could do. Did she expect me to toss Owen across to her? At this point I wanted to heed my son's advice and go home and so without hardly pausing we just walked through it again. The Boy Scouts were impressed and asked their troop leader if they could do that later. The woman looked at me as if I were the worst father in the world.  

We made it back to the car quickly from there. My wound was really starting to hurt, which I can only imagine was aggravated by spending some time in bacteria-filled water. We split a snack of crackers and Cuties and headed back to civilization--daddy bleeding all over the seat and Owen pointing out to me every cow and windmill we passed--and the waiting arms of our Mama. Every time Owen sees the shoes I was wearing he tells the story again of how daddy walked through water and Owen's feet got wet. 

Tune in soon for the next Adventures of Toby Loco and the Mouserat Kid.

My Small Bear

I have had a busy week with work and life and reading and have done little writing, so I thought I would do some easy writing: tell stories about my son. Besides, I could spend 10 hours on a post about some deep issue and it would not garner as much interest as 20 minutes spent writing about my boy. Which should give you some idea of how awesome he is.

Owen loves being in his bed. This doesn't mean that he sleeps the whole time he is there, but that he just loves being ensconced in his crib. It is the only place he still gets his pacifier, he has stuffed animals and blankets and he can just relax--I get it, sounds nice to me at about 2 o'clock every day. Clara went in a week or so ago to get him from his nap and he asked if he could stay. A few weekends ago when Clara was at work I went upstairs toward the end of his nap to read so I could hear him when he woke up. He woke up, but he didn't fuss or bang on the walls like he does sometimes. I pressed my ear to the door to hear him. He was practicing his vocabulary. "Mama, mama, mama. Daddy, daddy, daddy. Ball, ball, ball. Yes, yes, yes. Mama. Daddy. Yes." 

He has also become quite the household helper. He currently helps us with laundry, the dishes, cooking, sweeping, vacuuming, feeding the chickens, taking out the trash, putting the recycling into separate bins, and more things I am sure I am forgetting. And here is the thing: he loves to help. Loves it. He and I were building a tower with his blocks last night and Clara asked him if he wanted to help her cook. "Stir!" he said and ditched his old man. He redeemed himself by helping me grill the chicken and playing frisbee with me while we waited.

With the change in seasons, he has fallen in love with playing "upeball", which is his gentleman's effort at baseball. We use a big air-filled bouncy ball and the attachment for the vacuum as our bat. I alternately roll him the ball and he hits it (he says tennis when it is on the ground) and upeball when I throw it in the air. He likes to pitch as well and does his best imitation of my dramatized windup. This is essentially a 360 degree spin while standing on one foot. We were having problems getting him to hit off the rug in our living room. He kept wanting to hit it off the wood floor. We got the idea to tape a batter's box into the rug. Clara put the tape down while I showed him a video of baseball players launching home runs all while standing firmly in the batter's box. We went back to the living room and showed him his box and he flipped out with excitement. Every time he hit the ball he would run into the dining room where the computer is and point to it: "Dad, I am hitting it just like those guys!"

There are many more stories to tell. Words he is learning. Ideas. It is amazing to watch him grow, so fun to see some new concept click in his mind for the first time. To connect this, however tenuously, to my post a couple of weeks ago on the declining birthrate in our country, I want to say that raising kids is extraordinarily hard and challenging and a monumental time suck, but it is liberating at the same time. I am no longer the center of my universe. My son is. As will be my daughter here in a few months.

I read a writer once talking about how paralyzed she was in her twenties because of all the options open to her--career-wise, relationally, etc.--but now that she is in her thirties and married and locked into a career she feels more freedom despite the constriction. I feel that way with parenting. In the Donne poem I quote at the masthead of this blog, the old rogue tells God that unless he is bound he shall never be free. Life is like that in so many ways. Sometimes it takes steadfast commitment and the release of self to know who you really are and what really matters. My life is bound and restricted by my son, but it is also clarified and directed. I will provide for him. I will train him in the way that he should go. And that gives me direction, purpose, and focus. On top of that, it has increased my capacity to love and give. He, along with his mother and God's grace. is the greatest of gifts to my wandering soul.

The Case Against Young Marriage

I want to comment briefly here on a pair of articles that recently ran in Slate, the online magazine. The topic was marrying at an early age and the first article was written by a woman, Julia Shaw, who got married at a relatively young age (23). The other was a rebuttal article by another woman, Amanda Marcotte, for whom the advice to consider marrying young is anathema, what she calls a “conservative hobbyhorse.”

As far as marrying early goes, it would appear that I have a dog in the fight given my own relatively early marriage and while I do think marrying young can be delightful and ought to be considered before being dismissed out of hand, I am in no way dogmatic about this belief. But I was struck as I read Marcotte’s rebuttal at both the wrongheadedness of the data she compiles and the spleen with which she treats Shaw’s modest exhortation.

Shaw’s story is rather simple and fairly common. She went to college with big dreams and ambitions and no plans of being one of those girls who got married the week after graduation. She then met a guy and fell in love and married him way before she imagined she would. He was 25 and she was 23. (Clara once had a deal with a friend to not get married until she was 28, by which point in real life we had been married for four years and had a child. Life is like that.) What she found was that marriage wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but there was something really great about taking the steps toward maturation together. She and her husband were independent, where a lot of her unmarried friends were still fairly dependent financially on their parents, and they had decided to forego lavish vacations to build a life together. Her encouragement to her intended audience of similarly educated, middle class college graduates was that maybe our culture is not right when it tells us to wait until we are older to get married. Maybe there is something beautiful about doing life, all of life, with another person. She doesn’t say marriage is a silver bullet, only that our emphasis on marriage as the ultimate expression of love between soul mates forces a lot of people to wait unnecessarily. Sometimes the commitment of marriage makes that person all the more lovable to us. I remember well on our honeymoon watching Clara watch the monkeys playing around in the trees outside of our hotel room and thinking that I had no idea what love was four days before that when we exchanged vows.

Marcotte can barely stifle her disdain for this type of marriage proselytizing. She takes Shaw’s claim that exchanging the wedding vows in front of God and all of your friends and family can actually strengthen the bond you feel with your spouse as nonsense. Her main traction point for her argument is that people who get married at a young age tend to get divorced at a higher rate than those who marry older. Which is true, although not in the way Marcotte claims, as I will show briefly.

Marcotte has a weird paragraph in the middle where she uses Shaw’s financial independence from her parents as evidence that she is “talking up how much more cool stuff she can supposedly afford. . . now that she’s married.” But this is a complete (and willful) misreading. Shaw isn’t bragging about being able to afford a bunch of cool stuff. Quite the opposite. Shaw’s whole point is that she cannot afford a lot of the stuff her unmarried friends afford because most of her unmarried friends are still supported by their parents. She isn’t bragging, only asserting that marriage has made her more independent.

The lynchpin of Marcotte’s argument is that young marriages lead to more divorces. Something she is remiss to point out, and a fact hiding in plain sight at the bottom of the Chicago Tribune article she cites as damning the case for young marriage (people would be far more successful if they actually read the entire article they cite to bolster their claim; it is almost like she Googled “young divorce” and pasted the link to the first site that came up), is that young marriage is not such a big deal if you have a college education. Marriage at any age is generally more successful when both partners have received higher education. Shaw isn’t speaking to high school dropouts encouraging them to get hitched; she is telling her fellow college graduates that there is not necessarily a reason to kick the marriage can down the road until your 30s.

Marcotte ends by saying that she is “glad young marriage is working out for Shaw” but the entire tone of her article betrays this sentiment. She wants Shaw’s young marriage to fail, as she wants all young marriages to fail, in order to prove her point that young marriages fail. And her claim at the end that for the majority of women dating and cohabiting is working out just fine is another example of statistical disingenuousness. It is true, of course, for the elites in the system, but cohabiting and bearing children outside of marriage is wreaking havoc on the lower classes in this country.

So Marcotte’s argument collapses on itself. She is correct when she says that young marriages have a higher divorce rate, but she neglects to point out that if you break this out for educational attainment and income, i.e. the people Shaw is addressing in her article, then the divorce rate plummets. Her argument on this score has little to do with the reality of Shaw’s target demographic. On the other hand, she argues that delayed marriage and cohabiting is working out fine for women, but neglects to mention that what she means by “women” is educated, white women. In reality, then, both Shaw’s argument and Marcotte’s second claim, when applied to Shaw’s intended audience, are true. Educated people with middle to upper-middle class incomes can marry at whatever age they want and be generally successful. One demographer has joked that the key to a successful life is as simple as not getting married before 20 and waiting to have kids until after you are married.

Marcotte's last paragraph is symptomatic of the derangement even the suggestion of marrying young can throw some openminded people into. She begins her concluding paragraph: “Watching conservatives desperately try to bully women into younger marriage with a couple of promises and a whole lot of threats is highly entertaining but clearly not persuasive.” Maybe there are conservatives out there threatening women with dire consequences if they wait to get married until they are 30, holding shotguns to women’s backs and all, but she in no way proves it in her little rant. Shaw, her ostensible sparring partner in this debate, nowhere threatens or bullies or even promises a grand ole time once you tie the knot. Shaw’s claim is limited: young marriage can be fantastic. Marcotte’s is absolute: young marriage will ruin your life and Shaw just hasn’t wised up to that fact yet.

Her inability to engage with Shaw, specifically her inability to do Shaw the favor of actually treating her article as if it were written to a very specific audience, is unfortunate and sloppy. But her splenetic rant against young marriage as a conservative means of controlling women and her glee at predicting divorce for participants in young marriages is something more: an ideological rigidity and refusal towards charity worthy of Marcotte's most egregious targets on the right. It is funny how closeminded these openminded people can be. 

What to Expect When No One's Expecting

Walter Berglund, the protagonist of Jonathan Franzen's sometimes infuriating, often excellent 2010 novel Freedom is something of a liberal hypocrite. A one time apostle of Paul Ehrlich and population control activists, Berglund settled down in gentrifying St. Paul with his wife Patty and did the unthinkable: reproduced. . . twice! Berglund is burdened by this guilt his entire life, despite his love for his kids, and tries to recompense his misdeeds through a lifetime of service to the planet he sees himself as complicit in destroying. A bumbling sort of hero, Walter gets into some tangles even in that endeavor, but that is not really the point here.

Population control was once en vogue and is still rather blithely accepted by a significant portion of our nation's intellectuals as well as the average person who through trickle-down idiocy has come to accept overpopulation as fact. Pundit blowhard chieftain Thomas Friedman wrote Hot, Flat, and Crowded in 2008, and though he doesn't prescribe one child policies or anything as likely to elicit negative reaction the underlying assumption for the final descriptor is that our planet is perilously crowded with creatures possessing opposable thumbs and we need to ramp down productivity (so to speak) until our planet can heal itself. 

In other words, the danger to humanity rests for most on the side of overpopulation. Rarely do we see the opposite argument made: that the waning birthrate in this country and throughout the industrialized (and mostly entire) world is actually a dangerous, potentially unreversible reality that will have far-reaching consequences for pretty much everyone alive today. Which is why Jonathan Last wrote the cleverly titled What to Expect When No One's Expecting, a small book with big implications.

Last begins by recounting the time early in his marriage when he and his wife lived in a yuppie district of D.C., one of those neighborhoods where the dog boutiques outnumber the baby stores. An overwhelming majority of the inhabitants did not have kids and once you decided to take the plunge, the astronomical pricing of the neighborhood made it unrealistic for most to afford to live there with kids. To the suburbs, breeders! 

This little anecdote underscores that while children are increasingly valued in our culture (the $700 strollers, baby yoga sessions, preschool Mandarin classes, etc.) they are at the same time decreasingly present (shades of supply-side economics at work here). In other words, children are not required for help on the farm and most all of them live to adulthood these days so we don't have nearly as many. Perhaps even more importantly for our culture, the purpose of life is now self-fulfillment and raising kids is generally acknowledged to suck. Times they have a changed, and now children are more  of a personal accessory, something validating adulthood and accomplishment and to boast about at parties, than they are, say, a blessing from the Lord or, to take a different tack, necessary propagations in a Darwinian world. Or, going to neither extreme, something intrinsically worthwhile, even if they make life hard.

There are many factors contributing to the decline in fertility around the globe, and Last aims a sawed-off shotgun at our culture to try and hit them all. Some are admirable: the increasing freedom and equality of women in the past 50 years. Some are pernicious: the hookup culture and abortion. Some are the fruits of unforeseen consequences: Social Security and the welfare state for the elderly. And, as Last readily concedes, it is impossible to pinpoint a single cause or even the biggest cause. What we have in Western culture (though this is far from a Western problem; Japan is the reigning king of the dire consequences of decreased fertility) is a cocktail of elements all contributing to making babies less ubiquitous, desired, and necessary (in the short run, of course). And the long run effects of this trend are not potentially, but inevitably disastrous. 

Consider economics, for a moment. When Social Security was put in place by FDR in the 30s, the average life expectancy was 58.1 for men and 61.6 for women. So the number of people qualifying for Social Security payouts was exceedingly small. Over 40 workers contributed to the system for every beneficiary. Social Security, for those who followed the work of Bernie Madoff, is a Ponzi scheme, and as Madoff's dissatisfied clients found out, Ponzi schemes only work if you keep getting more suckers workers to buy in at the bottom level. When you combine low fertility with increased life expectancy, and refuse to touch the sacred cow of Social Security, you end up in a disturbing place. Where there used to be 40 workers for every beneficiary, today that number is at 2.5. By 2050 it will be under 2.0. Accordingly, Social Security taxes have been on the rise and can only be expected to continue to rise until the system implodes, we are annexed by China, or the Lord returns.  The low birthrate, coupled with an increasing lifespan makes for an unsustainable imbalance between the young and the old. Our population will soon look like an inverted pyramid, with ever increasing numbers at the top and decreasing numbers at the bottom. Which is good for a population. . . never. That is never a good thing and has never proved reversible.

Now consider the sociology of Social Security. Kids used to be a requirement if for no other reason than you needed someone to take care of you when you got older. It may not be the most romantic reason to have kids, but it is practical. Today, in a socialist dream, you have the state to take care of you. And here is the kicker, the state will even help you if you failed to contribute any suckers workers to the bottom of the Ponzi scheme. In other words, there is almost no practical reason in our culture to have children. You can refuse to have kids, put in your Social Security throughout your working life, and then overdraw based on what you put in from the paychecks of your friends' kids. 

I don't want to paint with too broad of a brush here. There are people unable to have kids and people who should not have kids (look at me sounding like a eugenicist), but that is not most people. Most people in our country who don't have kids make this decision as part of the proliferating "lifestyle choices" that must be ever-validated in our culture. (Unless, of course, that lifestyle choice involves having numerous children. Then, sadly, you are a nutjob.) And I don't think it does injustice to the word, or the sentiment behind most people not having kids, to call this selfish. People don't like that word, because it invokes judgment, which is again only proper when directed toward poor white people and the religious in our culture, but no one I ever met who has told me they never want kids has ever given me anything other than a selfish reason (i.e. travel, free time, don't want a real job). But in reality the only thing that allows people to make this "lifestyle choice" is that other people still keep having kids so the non-breeders can live off of the Social Security those kids keep pumping into the system. Again, not feelings, like "I feel bad that you called me selfish," but reality.

I am not here saying that we should only allow procreators to draw Social Security--that would be incredibly creepy legislation--, but that when the entire structure of a culture incentivizes people to refrain from having kids then that is a very dangerous place for a culture to go. As well as irrevocable.  Last runs through a catalogue of the social policies of Western Europe designed to reinvigorate the anemic fertility rates of our cosmopolitan models, and as a group they have failed. No matter how much time you give a mother (or father) off of work, no matter how great the government-sponsored daycare is, no matter what the cash payout tax refund is for bringing baby into the world, the birthrate refuses to budge. Which leads to a conclusion about government intervention in fertility: it is far easier to social engineer decreases in total fertility than it is to reverse engineer the previous efforts and inspire more robust fertility.

Some people will point to immigrant populations as a way to solve the problem. Latin American immigrants have a higher total fertility than a native U.S. of A'er, just as the majority Muslim immigrant population in Western Europe has a higher fertility rate than the native population. But this is an extremely short-term solution. Leaving off issues of immigrant integration, Last shows that within a generation of residency in the United States, Latin American fertility drops to levels just as low as natives. It makes no sense to keep allowing more and more immigration as a way to grab up the one immigrant generation of higher fertility. Talk about creepy policy, as well as a weird case of robbing Peter to pay Paul: this might help arrest the demographic plunge of the United States, but it would almost certainly hurt the country whose people we were pilfering. 

The really only other significant reason to have children, other than the practical reasons that used to exist, is because you believe them to be a blessing, despite the cost. Put another way, no one is going to all of a sudden start having kids because they believe it is their civic duty. We are no longer communally-minded. We are each of us, if not rugged, then pacified and entertained individualists. Freedom, to borrow a turn of phrase from John Milton, exists in license not true liberty in twenty-first century America. Put yet another way, in our current cultural climate you would only expect to find people committed to community and with ambitions beyond self-fulfillment having kids. People most often found in religious communities. Which is, in fact, what we are seeing. 

The total fertility rate for the American woman is at 2.01, or right about replacement rate, and dropping. However, if you break this down for women who attend church regularly, the total fertility rate jumps to 2.54. I know, I know, the stereotypes abound here, but it appears as if committed religious believers are the only people actively staving off massive population decline and the disastrous future that entails. As religion continues to wane in our country, it is difficult to see a secular source of such devoted childbearing arising from the ashes of religion.

Last's book struggles, as all such books struggle, when it comes to making recommendations. Prophets of doom are great at diagnosing and poor at prescribing. He suggests more family friendly tax policy and work situations, but he spent a good chunk of his book talking about how such policies are impotent elsewhere. If you take away both the economic/social incentives for having kids as well as breed an intense narcissism directed toward self-fulfillment and the search for the ever elusive self, it is difficult seeing how another month of maternity leave is going to make it seem worthwhile to invest 18 years plus (30 is the new 18) in raising multiple children.

So I throw my hands up in despair as I close, not knowing what to do. My despair isn't merely about the harsh economic future of a culture that is top heavy with old people, though that is certainly a daunting prospect (Japan recently became the first country wherein adult diapers outsold baby diapers, which I find to be extremely sad). My despair is that we have lost the language to call people to repentance. We have lost any notion that you can rebuke in kindness. More than that, we have lost almost any notion that we exist in community with one another, and are inextricably bound to one another. The most proffered defense for previously illicit activities is "I'm not hurting anyone else, so why do you care?" But we are not islands, and hell is Sartre's existentialism, not other people. Individual choices invariably effect the group, and my generation's great individual reticence to be parents is going to yield unimaginable long-term consequences for our culture. 

The Virtue in Boredom

Jordan Bloom of The American Conservative writes about a San Antonio megachurch that has recently spent $5 million dollars on an animatronic ark for their children's ministry. Given Bloom's high church leanings, he does the standard guffawing over such ostentatious expenditures (it's a good thing none of the older denominations of Christianity ever spend money frivolously). And he's right, of course, in a broad sense. It is pretty ridiculous to spend $5 million bucks on fake giraffes for children's church. Back in my day (the early 90s), we cut Bible characters out of coloring books, colored them with crayons, and then glued them to a Popsicle stick. Boom. Sunday School.

Look, its easy to make fun of excesses like this. The stories write themselves. But the pastor of the megachurch who defends the expenditure is absolutely correct when he points out that the church is competing against a lot of fancy enterprises more than willing to spend ludicrous amounts of money to get people to come by. We are a nation absolutely addicted to entertainment, and it is easy for people like me to talk about how church isn't the place for entertainment but I'm already a believer. When your goal is to bring new people into the fold, and you're competing against Disney World and Las Vegas, it is petty to impute bad motives to people who are trying to attract nonbelievers to their places of worship.

So the substance of Bloom's critique, and others who make similar critiques, ought to be directed more broadly against our culture itself. A culture that, above all, is absolutely terrified of being bored. I'm only being slightly tongue in cheek when I say that it is probably our greatest fear. Our entire cultural apparatus is constructed so that we will be protected from creeping boredom. Three year olds can operate smart phones so they can play Angry Birds while mom shops and they don't have to, even for a second, think of how to entertain themselves. Or just be bored and deal with it. A recent Sprint commercial informed its audience that we have a right (ah, the language of rights) to unlimited data. We are entitled to never having to be bored.

It is fair to hold the Church to a higher standard and worth arguing that we ought not be complicit in the dumbing down of our culture, but I don't know that we can point at San Antonio and say that is what they are doing. The church I went to in Manhattan met in a small, old-style church building with a steeple, a small meeting room and a basement with an open space and a kitchen. A hip Christian ideal. There was no room for any sort of children's church, and, in a classic case of chicken and egg, there were hardly any families with small children that attended. That was reality. And it wasn't going to suddenly change unless we bought a new place. We may bemoan it, bewail it, decry it, and gnash our teeth as we wish for the good old days of bewigged preachers and two hour sermons, but it is a fundamental reality of the culture the church is trying to reach.

Any change must start on the individual level, by encouraging Christian parents to unplug their kids. No smart phones (EVER!), allotted time for video games, allotted (and monitored) internet usage, mandatory reading time, mandatory backyard time. Make them sit in church with you and stay awake and take notes. (In junior high I went to a church with a Baptist preacher of the windbaggery persuasion and can tell you that kids can sit through 80 minutes of very boring sermoning maintaining good posture and a respectful demeanor.) Part of my goal in parenting Owen and the ones to come is to force them to be bored for at least part of every day. There is no virtue in boredom, but there is virtue in the fruits of boredom, properly channeled. And, yes, I have heard the old phrase "idle hands are the devil's playground." Two things: first, boredom is not the same thing as idleness; second, if idle hands are the devil's playground then what are young hands on an unbound technological device?

Implicit in my tiredness with these critiques of megachurch excess--critiques, remember, that I agree with--is that most of us making them are still complicit in the entertainment-saturated nature of our culture. For example, after writing a paragraph on the virtues of boredom I switched over to the Amazon tab on my browser and watched an episode of Justified on my prime account, afraid that this book on the Trinity I am reading would be less engaging than watching Timothy Olyphant strut around and shoot bad guys. In other words, we inundate our average lives with entertainment, hopping from blog to blog or video to video and then expect our churches to silence all of the noise for an hour and fifteen minutes on Sunday morning so we can contemplate in peace before we rush off into the next thing.

If we want the church to be different we need to be different. If we want the church to stand out from the constant noise of our culture we need to stand out from it as well. We can keep making fun of the megachurches which is a good enough time, but unless we are cultivating different habits in our daily life, habits which would make the church feel as if it weren't part of its mandate to entertain, then all we are really going to be doing is making fun of other Christians for being just like us every other time but Sunday morning.