You can't turn back time

I have to start by admitting a weakness to period dramas. I am still mad at Julian Fellowes for killing Matthew on Downton Abbey. I'm inspired by the nuns and nurses of Call the Midwife. Looking at the world of before my parents were born gives me a real respect for my foremothers. They were strong, intelligent creatures who worked so much harder than I've ever had to under societal constraints I can barely imagine. 

In all but the poorest levels of society, an out of wedlock pregnancy really could ruin a woman's life a hundred years ago. Even if the child was placed for adoption, the damage to reputation might close the doors to marriage or even work opportunities. Single mothers were often forced into begging or prostitution. Their children were at the highest risk for disease, abuse and starvation. 

I have never been without sympathy for women who feel forced into abortion by family, lovers or circumstance, but it's not hard to see how a woman in 1900 would have felt that abortion really was her only choice. In a world without anesthesia or antibiotics, who would have considered surgery if they felt they had other options. I'm guessing that most of them knew pretty much exactly what they were doing. Society put them in a corner and there was little or no help for fallen women. So they made a horrible choice and lived with the guilt and pain.

I'm very grateful and proud that between then and now women stood up and demanded to be treated differently by society and the law. We claimed full citizenship and the rights that came with it to vote, own property, pursue careers and reject double standards that allowed men to father children without consequence but condemned women for the same act.  The majority of early feminists were staunchly anti-abortion and most of them didn't​ live to see the vision realized. They started a movement so that their daughters and granddaughters could live in a world where a woman should never feel like she has to choose between her own life and her child's life.

It saddens me so much to see how that dream has been manipulated. Instead of celebrating the power of women to be mothers no matter what the circumstance, today's feminists celebrate the abortion industry and encourage women to kill their offspring for any reason. They point at men and say, "you are horrible because some of you didn't take responsibility for your sons and daughters," and then insist that women have the right to be even more callous towards new life. They write "choice" on their t-shirts and still something like 80% of women who have abortions don't feel like they have any other choice. They shout, "Don't let men tell you what you can do with your body," but when a man threatens to leave his pregnant girlfriend unless she aborts, they are silent.

I hear the women of the millennial generation are starting to wake up to the hypocrisy of their mothers. They were born liberated from the shame of unwed motherhood. They don't let men tell them what to do. They don't see any reason why they can't be mothers and CEO's. I just pray that they can finish the fight for a world where no one tells a woman she has to choose between her own life and the life of her child.

Big Brother Is Watching You

If you haven't read or viewed George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, the title of this blog probably doesn't mean anything to you. In fact, if you're much younger than 40, you're likely wondering why, if he's watching, he doesn't like more of your posts or subscribe to your channel.
For the rest of us, this is just another bit of evidence that Orwell was an excellent futurist.
I know I'm not the only one who is seeing more of this dystopian masterpiece in modern life every day. There are dozens of 1984 memes and quotes in my Facebook feed right now. Big brother works at Google and moonlights at Facebook. Statues are being pulled down. Textbooks are rewritten without important historical events. The word facist it's being thrown around like it means conservative by people who are acting just like real facists against people who are acting like real Democrats.
For those of you don't know why this makes us think of an old book, do yourself a favor and read it. It's probably still at your local library and there are versions on Kindle unlimited.
Or don't. Maybe it wouldn't really help.
George Orwell may have been too smart for his own good.
Today's young people would probably find his dystopia unrelatable. They see the world headed towards a socialist Utopia filled with hyper individuality. Everyone is taken care of. You have a general obligation to the world, but none of those pesky personal or moral obligations that require you to be uncomfortable, like caring for the sick. You define your gender/species/reality. Everyone can be a gender studies major. The restrooms clean themselves.
They lack any understanding of how socialism actually works in practice. They haven't really looked closely at North Korea. There are a few iron clad rules of socialism and communism that their education glossed over. The one that will probably terrify them the most is that there will be no single source African coffee with steamed soy milk and fair trade chocolate. There will be a constant shortage of coffee and no chocolate at all. If they survive that, here are a few things that can look forward to:
1. Forced Conformity. Socialism has no room for diversity of anything. North Korea has a short list of allowable HAIRCUTS. It struggles to deal with two genders. Forget having forty. And it has a simple solution.
2. Reeducation. You will be made to believe and behave in acceptable ways. Not by your neighbors saying crazy things like, "two men can't really get married," but by concentration camps where extreme brainwashing takes place. According to escapees from NoKo, these techniques have been incorporated into everyday television broadcasts. And since some people just won't change.
3. Mass murder. Utopia is always just a few thousand deaths away. Communist and socialist leaders were responsible for over 130 million deaths in the twentieth century. One girl who escaped from North Korea described her friend's mother being publicly executed for watching a Western television program. Remember conformity? Ethnic minorities, such as Jews and Armenians, have been among the more popular groups targeted for extinction.
Orwell's world looks quite conservative to today's young people with the chastity brigades and war mongering. But it's not a right wing reality. For all our desire to pass on our moral standards, one of the biggest is that you don't have any legal right to stop people from being unique and weird. You hope that natural consequences will encourage good behavior. You try to teach your kids self discipline. But if an adult wants to sit on their lawn in pajamas trying to charm June bugs in their spare time, you can't have them arrested for it. If someone says they belong to a superior race, you are welcome to stop inviting them to garden club, but you can't beat them up. No one is killed for saying the government is wrong.
They are in socialist countries. No matter how warm and fuzzy the promises of Utopia may be, history has never shown us a version that doesn't include the above. It's the guy with a plain white van he claims is full of puppies and candy. No matter how many children he kidnaps, rapes and murderers, there is a seemingly endless supply of naive kids who believe in the puppies and sweets. Orwell tried to tell us not to get in. He told us it was a lie. But his truth doesn't look enough like their expectations, so they ignore him until it's too late.