Tuesday, October 31, 2006

The Auto People

Mt grandparents were of the "Lost Generation," those who came of age after the First World War, a time of expat Yanks living the artistic life in Paris, of the Jazz Age, of the Blues, of a time when the values of the Victorians came apart and fell to dust in the aftermath of the devastation of Europe after the most meaningless and destructive war to date in our history. The Lost Generation, Hemingway calls it.

I saw a pregnant woman today. I could hardly believe my eyes. I looked around me and I don't see the lost generation of my unborn children. I have trouble conjuring the faces of the children of my comtemporaries, 'cause they are so few and so seldom seen -- if they live at all. And of them, those few who didn't go out due to abortion, birth control, or adoption at best, the children of my friends are mostly childless themselves now in their early 30s.

What devastating epiphany kept our own from having children?

If anyone wants my stuff when I die it'll be a race to grab it before it ends up in the land-fill. Stuff? One would have hoped life was something more than accumulating it just for the sake of a few years of comfort and cheap thrills at the mall.

There's an empty space, and there is the lost generation.

3 comments:

A Free Man said...

This is a scary outcome! Im in me late 20's myself and only 1 friend that I have known has had a kid as of yet. No one else I know has had a child!
This is where the Muslims are going to hurt us most, outbreeding us!
There will be a next generation it just wont be American/Canadian/European!

Pastorius said...

Just call yourself Dag Chaplain. You can still do it, my man.

Dag said...

Like Charlie Chaplin marrying Paulette Godard? That's not really what I had in mind.

I haven't put up links because Santa's little helper is no longere doing such tasks for me. I'll see if I can figure it out and do it myself.

I wonder about those people who don't have children. I wonder if it's because most of them are atheists who simply find their own lives so boring and meaningless that they spend all their time and energies trying to find a reason to care about their own lives to the point they don't have anything left over for children or the thought of them at all.

Cars give us freedom to travel beyond our usual bounds, and movies give the illiterate and unthinking world a chance to experience a world they could never otherwise imagine; and drive-in movies give us privacy and freedom to make babies if we choose to, but if there's no reason to care about babies or life or anything at all, then of course we end up alone and withered. We have so much, and yet we piss it away for nothing.

Arrivaderci, baby.