Privacy, Motherhood, And Family Life In Europe And America

The Holy Family

Dear Fred,

Thanks for your email.

I know the kind of privacy to which you refer.

My mother was imbued with it.

That said, I was quite surprised when Mom started working at the school cafeteria as soon as we kids were gone.

Although Europeans have fewer children than Americans, they honor motherhood much more than we.

As a blinkered ideologue, I think Laura does not look squarely at certain facts - cannot look squarely at certain facts.

For example, the overwhelming majority of American families have one, two or three children and typically have them in fewer than  5 years.

Then, by the time "the kids" are 16, they are pretty much "on their own."

In no way am I saying that children have been "banished," or that "we" feel an urge to "expel" them from the family.

Rather, by the age of 16 -- which is two years older than the Virgin Mary when she married Joseph -- kids self-segregate. 

They hang out with their own friends. And no matter how much we may pine to prolong children's childhood and enjoy their ongoing company -- they are effectively gone.

And so, in a typical human's 80 year life span, there are only 20 years of nuclear family "nesting."

If, as Richard Nixon proposed, we paid mothers $20,000.000 a year to stay home with their children during those crucial two decades, the per child investment would amount to $400,000.00, an investment that "post-Christian" European nations happily make in motherhood and family. (See "Nixon's Guaranteed Minimum Income Proposal" - http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/nixons-guaranteed-minimum-income.html)

I sometimes think people gravitate to "post-Christianity" because it is more compassionate than authoritarian Christianity with its puritanical urge to emblazon every Hester Prynne with a Scarlet Letter.

***

Of course, given Americans' ruggedly individual refusal to pay enough tax to enable broad-based civilization, we hunker down in our degraded - and degrading - socio-economic bunkers, deliberately appealing to "the lesser angels of our nature," and expecting the worst. 

See "The Paranoid Style In American Politics" - http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/01/paranoid-style-in-american-politics-by.html

Most Americans cannot even consider tax hike without blind rage welling up.

Ironically, this churning ire is the price we pay for living in The United States of Barbaria.

There is nothing kin to America's urban (and rural) degradation anywhere in Western Europe, where -- ironically -- people pay (modestly) more tax than we but know from long experience that they get correlatively more in return.

Have you read Ben Franklin's quotation in "Politics and Economics: The 101 Courses You Wish You Had"?  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/01/politics-and-economics-101-curricula.html

Benjamin Franklin to Robert Morris

25 December, 1783

"The Remissness of our People in Paying Taxes is highly blameable; the Unwillingness to pay them is still more so. I see, in some Resolutions of Town Meetings, a Remonstrance against giving Congress a Power to take, as they call it, the People's Money out of their Pockets, tho' only to pay the Interest and Principal of Debts duly contracted. They seem to mistake the Point. Money, justly due from the People, is their Creditors' Money, and no longer the Money of the People, who, if they withold it, should be compell'd to pay by some Law.

All Property, indeed, except the Savage's temporary Cabin, his Bow, his Matchcoat, and other little Acquisitions, absolutely necessary for his Subsistence, seems to me to be the Creature of public Convention. Hence the Public has the Right of Regulating Descents, and all other Conveyances of Property, and even of limiting the Quantity and the Uses of it. All the Property that is necessary to a Man, for the Conservation of the Individual and the Propagation of the Species, is his natural Right, which none can justly deprive him of: But all Property superfluous to such purposes is the Property of the Publick, who, by their Laws, have created it, and who may therefore by other Laws dispose of it, whenever the Welfare of the Publick shall demand such Disposition. He that does not like civil Society on these Terms, let him retire and live among Savages. He can have no right to the benefits of Society, who will not pay his Club towards the Support of it." http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html 

Pax on both houses,

Alan

On Fri, Oct 18, 2013 at 1:47 PM, Fred Owens <froghospital911@gmail.com> wrote:

There is another aspect of privacy that Laura Wood talks about so well, and that is about leading a private life and having a home. My mother would fit that role. To the world, she was Mrs. Fred Owens. But if you were a part of her private life you called her Marie or Mom.

Women were private people and they maintained a private world. For better or for worse, that private life is gone now.