If We Care About Children

Often ignored in the controversy about the U.S. Supreme Court decision to allow states to forbid abortion, is the cost of having a child in this country. If we care about children, perhaps we ought to make it easier to have them.

Rose Marie Berger, an editor at Sojourners magazine, visited the issue of free births (Sojo.net, May, 2023.) She quoted extensively from an article by Elizabeth Bruenig (The Atlantic, “Make Birth Free,” July 9, 2022.) According to the article, a birth in the United States costs an average of $18,265. The average not covered by insurance, the article states, is about $2,850. Presumably, poorer mothers tend not to have any medical insurance.

Raising a child continues to cost, of course—food, adequate shelter, clothes, doctor visits, and so on. In addition, unusual medical conditions can render more expenses than any normal household can cover. Some parents have family medical insurance through a job. Having a job, however, is not a guarantee of medical insurance. Lesser paying, more seasonal jobs, often have no medical insurance.

While Medicare provides medical insurance for older Americans, medical care for children often depends on what kind of job their parents have.

If we want to save children’s lives, both those unborn and those already born, we could start simply with making children more affordable for average Americans.

Evacuation

During my orientation to the U.S. Foreign Service, one of the presenters confidently told us that, for sure, given a normal diplomatic career, we’d all be evacuated, due to war or civil turmoil, at least once from the U.S. embassy or consulate where we were assigned.

Actually, I was evacuated twice, upping the odds. Before you have visions of my being airlifted to safety by a U.S. military helicopter, however, I must confess that both were blessedly uneventful.

In Algeria, my tour was curtailed early because of ongoing strife in the country and increasing threats against diplomats and other foreign nationals. I left on a crowded Air Algérie flight to Paris where I enjoyed an afternoon and evening before flying out to Washington the next day.

In Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, terrorist attacks against Americans led to another embassy draw down of embassy personnel. This time I flew out on a crowded flight to Amsterdam and enjoyed an evening in another pleasant European city.

I was quite fortunate. Recent evacuations are more likely to mirror the kind recently carried out in Afghanistan and Sudan. In Sudan, the more recent, American embassy staff were brought to safety by helicopter, as chaos descended on the country.

The evacuations in Sudan followed dangerous battles between two strongmen, each wanting power and apparently too selfish to care about what they were inflicting on the citizens of their country.

Yes, U.S. diplomats are sometimes killed. Their names are inscribed on walls in a lobby of the U.S. State Department in Washington. Fortunately, however, most American and other foreign diplomats usually make it out. Left behind are ordinary men, women, and children facing civil war, including not only physical attacks but also starvation as basic goods run out and cannot be replaced.

The diplomatic world is perhaps chastened again by its helplessness, as its members leave carnage and perhaps memories of local friends and acquaintances who have no U.S. helicopters to bring them to safety.

 

Where Are the People?

Increasing internet use combined with Covid-19 has devastated our time with each other.

Restaurants closed as people ate at home. Workers met on Zoom. Shoppers avoided stores to buy over the internet. Town halls and religious groups experimented with hybrid meetings. Today, schools struggle to cope with returning students after two years of attempts at remote learning.

Covid led us through separations resembling a time of war. We are struggling to adjust. A lifestyle already dictated by automobiles and suburbs was upended further by the pandemic.

How do we relearn our people skills? How do we learn to meet together again? How do we come out from our home burrows?

How do we integrate singles back into society again? How do we help those caught in the drug epidemic to find restoring community? How do we overcome the easy use of guns to interrupt peaceful gatherings?

We are in search of community, of people gathering safely to share lives. We are in search of those willing to commit to each other and to care for one other.

As we confront our changed society, may we have the dedication, patience, and discipline to persevere and overcome the currents that would tear us apart.

May we grow the communities we so need.

Unhooking Illegal Drugs

That illegal drugs are a problem in the United States is obvious to many Americans. Finding ways to deal with the problem, however, is something of a problem in itself.

Alexander Ward listed in Politico some suggested solutions by various members of the U.S. congress, including at least one suggestion to bomb Mexico. (“GOP embraces a new foreign policy: Bomb Mexico to stop fentanyl,” April 10, 2023)

Targeted strikes against drug lords, labeling drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, and other ideas have been suggested by members of congress.

I’m hardly qualified to suggest ways to defeat drug cartels. However, I suggest that one way of battling illegal use might be to examine why so many Americans fall into the illegal drug trap in the first place.

After all, if Mexican cartels disappear tomorrow, other cartels in other countries will step into the market. If the market is there, sellers will rise to meet the demand. All sorts of different ways exist to overcome U.S. efforts against drug sellers.

What can we do to unhook Americans off drugs?

We could begin by exploring the question from a different angle: Why do some Americans, especially young Americans, avoid drugs?

I would think that families and care givers who love and support their children are the most important factor in raising drug free children. That is not to say that such families will never have children who become drug users. It would be of no help to parents who dearly love and support their children when a tough world finds a way to warp their children’s lives.

It is merely to say that parents who are able to love and support and spend time with their children are the best defense against habits that might destroy those children.

What can we do to encourage parents to be parents?

Begin with the basics: no child should go hungry or not have a secure place to sleep at night. As some cities try to help the homeless, provide special care to families and to parents.

This includes safe spaces to eat and sleep, but it also can include support to parents who might have a problem with drugs themselves to stay drug free. It can support as well any programs to help parents find jobs and learn useful skills.

The goal is a society which rids itself of harmful drug use by becoming a productive society and one less likely to seek harmful drugs.

Parent Early

Beginning in the later twentieth century, women with small children began increasingly entering the labor force. Some were fortunate in being able to afford adequate child care, or perhaps a grandparent enjoyed keeping the children during the day.

Many women found their jobs to be stimulating and affirming. Many more worked simply because their families could not survive without the money their jobs brought in. This segment included, obviously, many single mothers.

Regardless, working at a paid job is now a major part of life for many young and middle-aged women. Many of these women also want to be parents in a world which increasingly separates parenthood from paid work.

The great separation between jobs and homes began centuries ago. The laboring world became largely male while the home world was mostly composed of mothers and other women. However, this began to change for many reasons, including the need for women to hold civilian jobs during World War II. Regardless, women became a major part of the work force, even while jobs became increasingly performed outside the home.

One effect of the Covid pandemic was the realization that work done through computers could often be done from home. After vaccination against the disease made office work again feasible, some newly home based workers resented returning to the office.

While adjustments are still being made in work/home arrangements, the birth rate continues to fall in developed societies, where a significant percentage of adults work outside the home. Obviously work/home separation especially affects mothers or potential mothers, since they are the ones whose wombs carry the babies and who usually are most important to children in their first years.

Surveys show that many women desire more children than they actually have. For families able to survive on one income for a few years, women might consider reversing the career model: children in the early years of their lives, then beginning a career in their thirties.

This would mean more time to think about career choices. It might also mean time to take academic classes, which can more easily fit into flexible schedules than a job.

We also live longer now. Starting a career in the thirties, or even the forties, may mean choosing with more wisdom than we might have at an earlier age.

 

Healing Before Leading

This week a school killing in the city where I grew up, Nashville, Tennessee, brought the tragedies of my country a little closer to me.

How can we expect to live up to our world leadership status when we can’t even protect school children? How can we lead the world against tyranny when we lack money for adequate water systems in some American cities? How can we support democratic movements in other countries when our own country experiences rising income inequality?

To lead the world does not require that we think we are better or more superior to other nations. It does require that we practice respect for each other and for differing opinions. No one person, government official or private citizen, has all the answers.

Democracy requires that some win elections and some lose elections. The winners have an obligation to listen to all opinions while carrying out their programs. The losers have an obligation to respect the right of the winners to govern even while respectfully disagreeing with them on some or many issues.

To squander the blessings given us by withdrawing into our corners and waiting for an opportunity to knock the other unconscious hardly produces a well governed country.

Perhaps a country governed by the people is more like a continuing race in which different teams hand off power to another team who performs better. Nobody is annihilated. The losers rest and enter the contest at a later date.

Where Do We Work?

When my children were very small, I was fortunate that I could work from home. That’s because my vocation was free-lance writing.

Of course, for generations almost everyone, both men and women, worked from home. Our work was there—farms, woodlands, preparing food. Our work activities were in our homes or close by.

The industrial revolution changed the location of jobs in developed countries and led to a larger separation between home and work. Some factories produced unhealthy waste. Businesses searched for efficiency and created job centers for workers only.

For those who could afford it, the men mostly worked at paying jobs in the cities while more women and children moved further out into the suburbs. Women no longer were a significant part of providing income or producing goods for the family.

Gradually, women came back into the labor force, but children generally were taken care of elsewhere—sometimes adequately, sometimes not. The birth rate lowered as some adults solved the problem of childcare by not having children at all.

The ability of some to work remotely through computers raised the possibility of more work done at home—if our office culture could adjust to this practice. The Covid pandemic, of course, quickened the amount of work done remotely.

Questions are still debated: Did this reduction of shared office space affect the quality of work done? Restrict needed worker interaction?

But what about our city centers and the jobs seemingly dependent on a work force spending five days a week there? Or can city centers reinvent themselves to be family friendly? Places where families can live as well as work and go to school?

How can we connect social need for close relationships with economic need for work places?

What Size Houses Do We Need?

Somebody has suggested that the country has plenty of space for housing. The problem, they believe, is a perceived desire for large lots and houses versus smaller lots and houses. Large houses make more money for builders and perhaps for sellers later on, it is suggested. Yet few families need large houses (unless they are the increasingly rare multi-generational family.)

The ability of some to work online while living physically away from traditional job centers adds to current ideas about where a home is supposed to be.

My housing history has included a variety of housing. I grew up in a close in city suburb with varying size houses and lots. My father commuted to his job in the city by bus. Our house was on a small plat, but my parents kept a lot on one side as a possible investment. It’s still there with the current owners of my childhood home.

Since then, I have lived in about as many varieties of built housing as is possible in a life time. I have lived in a typical suburban small house as well as in apartments and in a condo.

After joining the U.S. foreign service, my housing varied even more. In less developed countries, I sometimes lived in a compact embassy housing compound. In a first world country, I rented my own housing, a small apartment. In a failing north African country, I lived in a mansion because the U.S. embassy was able to rent it cheaply when the country’s well-off fled political turmoil. (I only stayed a few months before the embassy was drawn down due to the turmoil.)

Currently, my husband and I live in our own home, on the top two floors while we rent the bottom apartment. It’s on a small lot, close to our small town’s restaurants, stores, churches, city hall, and post office. Near our house, a community group is building small housing intended for those working in the lesser paying jobs of the area.

I consider the current location the best of any we’ve lived in. The answer, I believe, is community, encouraged by smaller housing.

We often are fixated on housing when perhaps community is a more important need.

Dominion, by Tom Holland

The recent book, Dominion, by Tom Holland, is a thought-provoking history of Christianity. For me, it comes in the back door of secular journalism toward an unusual defense of the religion. I saw Dominion not as the work of an apologist but of a bare-knuckled but admiring observer.

I gained a sense of the revolutionary teachings of Jesus and the very human capabilities of those attempting to follow those teachings.

We are right to condemn atrocities in the name of any religion, including Christianity. Give Christianity its due, however. It’s difficult to find a religion having more influence toward the uplifting of women or the abolishment of slavery.

In the name of Christ, despite the failings of some who go by that name, the hungry are fed, the thirsty have wells built for them, the homeless are given shelter, hospitals are built for the sick, clothes are gathered for the raggedly clothed, and ministries are begun for those in prison.

One of the miracles of Christianity is its call to the weak, its raising of hope that we, though sinners, can change and become healers.

People Versus Machines?

“Machines are not better at personal care, machines are not better cooks, and machines will not necessarily be better than people at driving trucks.”

Lant Pritchett, the author of these words, is a research director at the University of Oxford and a former Wold Bank economist. Pritchett makes the case for immigration over automation in “People Over Robots,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2023.

He points out that some automation replaces the work of a laborer with the work of a customer, as when a customer must use a self-checkout machine. Pritchett doesn’t mention it, but I suspect some of us may miss the human interaction with a live cashier as well.

The dramatically lower birth  rates in developed countries, as well as the increasingly higher education levels, have led to a shortage of workers for “manual, nonroutine tasks,” Pritchett writes. We are, it seems, in need of workers while less developed countries have a surplus of potential workers. Pritchett sees as a waste of time and resources the efforts to develop machines for work better done by humans.

A lack of agricultural workers may result in less than beneficial results, Pritchett writes. Farmers relying on machines may prefer genetically modified products that can be better harvested by machines such as thicker-skinned tomatoes. Automation may tend to eliminate foods that can’t easily be harvested by machines, such as asparagus and strawberries.

As Pritchett points out, the movement of labor happens with or without legality. The problem with illegal movements is their tendency to exploitation and abuse.

It seems a waste of both people and nature not to provide for people-oriented immigration policies.

Inviting the Poor to Our Good Times

Apparently, Jesus enjoyed a good time. He was no killjoy rabbi but was often invited to feasts and gatherings.

His only rebuke about such gatherings had to do with who was invited: did invitations to the feasts include even the poor and unfortunate of society?

No one of us is wealthy enough to erase all poverty or hunger or sickness. As far as I can tell, that is not the point. The point is that, if we are following Christ, one of our tasks is ministering to people in need.

In fact, Jesus taught that those invited into the kingdom at the last judgement are those who ministered to the hungry, the thirsty, the strangers, the poorly clothed, the sick, and those in prison.

We aren’t just saved from our sins; we find a new vocation.

As we are blessed, so are we called to bless others.

Stepping Out

The Pan American Boeing 747 taxied down a runway of the JFK airport around 9 p.m. on December 4, 1990, and lifted off. I watched the New York City metropolitan area spreading out in a vast sea of lights. It was the first international plane trip of my life. I was beginning my first assignment as a U.S. Foreign Service officer.

The takeoff began my trip to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a change of planes in Frankfurt, Germany, then to Riyadh. In Riyadh, I was to change planes again for a final short flight to Saudi Arabia’s port city of Jeddah.

Looking back, I have to laugh at all the mistakes a hyped up newbie Foreign Service officer could make. I had packed my suitcase too full, and it was obvious, once I landed in New York City for consultations, that it wasn’t going to last out the trip.

Fortunately, a kind officer in the New York office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service took me to a luggage store for a better suitcase.

Of course, the new suitcase was possibly the reason I identified the wrong one when I, seriously jet lagged, changed planes in Riyadh. Eventually, the luggage was sent back to the right person in Riyadh, and mine returned to me in a day or so.

However, due to the fact that I had no luggage for my first evening in Jeddah, I had to attend a welcoming reception wearing the travel-stained outfit I’d worn for several days. I also developed a blister on my foot from walking around in my travel shoes.

My first assignment began a few weeks before the the start of the First Gulf War. It pitted Iraq against Saudi Arabia, with the United States and other allies supporting Saudi Arabia.

Due to new assignments and training, the former officer had been transferred to another job before I arrived, so I missed training with the one I was replacing. I fell into my visa services job with no overlap as the war began.

After daytime duties in the visa section (overflowing with foreign nationals seeking visas to leave the country now coveted by Saddam Hussein), I worked in the control room in the evenings. This operation was a command center overseeing American wartime activities, including supervising high level U.S. officials coming to confer with Saudi Arabian officials on the war efforts.

I not only survived but treasured that first foreign assignment as a time of comradery with fellow Americans seeking to serve our country in a time of crisis.

I had joined the Foreign Service with the hope of living in other countries and enjoying an exciting and meaningful vocation. I was not disappointed.

Writers and Faith

“Where faith and poetry both work is in getting people to accept that things don’t line up in an easy way. And by learning that, ideally, we learn how to be with each other and how to be in a relationship with God.” (Shane McCrae, “Obliqueness and Extravagance; A Conversation with Rowan Williams and Shane McCrae,” Image, Winter, 2022)

As I remember, I was not a particularly early reader. Somewhere, however, as the alphabet came together in words, I discovered the joy of story. I read, and I mimicked by writing stories myself. I wrote all kinds of stories: children having adventures, solving crimes, righting wrongs.

Through stories, as I continued writing them into adolescence and adulthood, I dealt with everything from boredom to the wrongs in the larger world. My ability to right wrongs might be limited, but I could call out the wrongs and show how the characters of a story dealt with them.

I learned that a struggling individual has need of the “serenity prayer.”
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference. (First publicized by Reinhold Niebuhr)

Writing is a tool. Like any tool, it can be used for good or bad—to build up or to tear down. Not everything built is good, nor is everything torn down bad. As the prayer says, we need, not only talent or opportunity, but wisdom.

And so some of us who are Christians, humbly asking God’s guidance, begin to write what we are given.

Renewing Democracy

Actually, the United States does not have a democracy. We do not elect our national leaders by popular vote. We elect them by people called electors, sent to Washington in early January every four years by the states after the presidential election.

Until January 6, 2021, few Americans paid attention to the electoral college, meeting after each presidential election to certify the vote. For most of our history, it functioned as a kind of rubber stamp after the November election.

Where did this “electoral college” come from? Some of our nation’s founding leaders, back in the late eighteenth century, didn’t trust the idea of ordinary citizens electing their leaders. They wanted a group of supposedly enlightened state leaders to actually decide on the outcome of the presidential election. Ordinary citizens would elect these “electors” who would then make the choice for them of the next president.

We all know how that turned out.

Nothing humans devise is perfect. We must constantly fine tune even well-thought out designs. After the January 6, 2021 calamity, perhaps we should examine the idea of political parties, whose development the founding citizens didn’t foresee.

One suggestion for overcoming the power of political parties is ranked choice voting. Voters rank political candidates on their ballots instead of voting only for one.

Another is overcoming gerrymandering. Gerrymandering allows winners of an election to create voting districts that don’t reflect the population density but instead create weird districts that tie the favored party into divisions that favor them.

Regardless of the methods chosen, we need voting laws which decrease the power of parties and increase the power of individual voters.

Free to Worship as I Please

The first amendment to the U.S. Constitution proclaims: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof . . .”

This freedom from government interference may be the main reason religious institutions have flourished in the United States. We can choose our religious preferences or not, as we think best. Religious institutions are maintained by people who believe in them. They wither and die if they no longer are seen to meet needs.

John Leland, a Baptist minister in 1802, called an established religion “spiritual tyranny—the worst of despotism. It is turnpiking the way to heaven by human law, in order to establish ministerial gates to collect toll. It converts religion into a principle of state policy, and the gospel into merchandise.” (Quoted by Brian Kaylor and Beau Underwood, “A Danger to the Church,” Sojo.net, January 2023.)

Freedom of religion reaps other dividends. The first responders against slavery, racial injustice, poverty, war, and other injustices have tended to come from religious leaders. They often operate as our conscience.

Freedom of religion, it turns out, is more likely to promote lively religion.

We Have Met the Enemy

For several years after the end of the Cold War in the 1990’s, we assumed that democratic traditions would take over the world. However, we discovered that democracy was more fragile than we thought. Indeed, democracy requires continued care from the nations who endorse it.

Previous to the Russian invasion of Ukraine early in 2022, the United States attempted to decrease global involvement in democracy. The country’s failures in Afghanistan and its less than stellar performance in the Middle East soured the country on commitments abroad.

Europe, however, was another story, even though Americans weren’t keen on involvement even there until the Russian attempt to take over Ukraine. The obvious desire of most citizens of that country to resist what was obviously an invasion of a sovereign European nation changed American ideas about resistance.

Robert Kagan, of the Brookings Institution, in an article about our change, wrote: “Russia’s invasion has changed Americans’ views not only of Ukraine but also of the world in general and the United States’ role in it. (“A Free World, If You and Keep It,” Foreign Affairs, January/February 2023)

This change mirrors the past history of the county. Americans were not keen to become involved in the two world wars of the twentieth century until it became evident that what was happening in Europe and Asia concerned us as well.

Writing about U.S. president Franklin Roosevelt, Kagan said that his “interventionist policies from 1937 on were not a response to an increasing threat to American security. What worried Roosevelt was the potential destruction of the broader liberal world beyond American shores.”

Kagan traces the path of the United States as it grew from this reluctant involvement in affairs beyond our shores to a perhaps belated understanding that if the U.S. doesn’t defend a democratic world order, no one will.

Indeed, Kagan believes that the absence of American involvement in world affairs will in itself encourage dictatorship and great power conflict.

He does not mention one obstacle hindering our acceptance of the continued role we can play toward a more democratic world order. This is the danger of refusing to allow one of our own elections to stand as proved and certified.

As Walt Kelly’s comic strip character Pogo said “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Commuter Rebellion

One thing we learned from the Covid period: American workers dislike the commute. Office workers freed to work at home by the pandemic discovered how much they enjoyed the new found casualness. They also enjoyed the extra time gained by skipping that long ride into the office.

We long ago separated home and office. Now we wonder why workers, having found the possibility of working from home, don’t want to deal with lost time in commutes and other restrictions involved with their office jobs.

Maybe we should question why the long commute happened in the first place. Why did we allow this distance between work and home?

Suburbs were birthed by a rebellion against city life: everything from often less adequate schools in the city to perceived higher crime rates. Suburbs were the answer: mothers and children in a safe environment, while fathers earned the money to make possible the newer, safer life.

However, some women found the safe life also a boring life. They were safe from the supposed evils of the city but also away from its liveliness and excitement, not to mention career opportunities.

The advantages of suburbia faded as more women desired entry into the work force. The idea of dad going off to work in the distant city while mom stayed with the children also has changed with the need for two incomes for many families.

Of course, these are the fortunate families with two parents. Single parent households face the hardships of trying to raise a family on one income, including the often impossibility of affording a suburban home.

Cities, however, are more than job centers. They also are centers for creation: music and drama and often for learning found in city colleges and universities.

The abandonment of the city by many of the middle class certainly increased the problems of homelessness and drugs and mental illness for those left behind . These unfortunates need our compassion and help, but our beleaguered cities need more than that. They also need safe, affordable neighborhoods for workers as well.

 

Generations

Plough magazine devoted its Winter 2023 issue to the topic of “generations.” In the recent history of western nations, interaction between generations has become less important. Suburban growth led first to the nuclear family, then to an increase in single adults living away from any daily family connection.

As the family became less important, so did institutions that nurtured family, including religious gatherings and school support groups. Society became tethered to careers and the office. Social gatherings tended to coalesce around career.

The Covid pandemic isolated us further. Even our work togetherness deteriorated as workers carried out their duties through remote settings.

I grew up a long time ago in a community where neighbors met each other in unplanned social gatherings. We would sit out on our porch during the summer and neighbors would stop by and chat for a while. During the winter, they visited spontaneously in the evenings in our living room. I sat on the floor and listened to the adults tell jokes and share ideas.

Those same neighbors joined to support local school carnivals and other events to raise money for school projects. Churches sometimes hosted events for the entire neighborhood. Members of one church would support the events of neighboring churches.

We should not paint such an idyllic picture of such times that we forget the sins of the era, as well, like segregation and all white governments. Yet some of the movements that led to the dismantling of those systems were crafted in small groups of friends and in neighborhood settings.

Our current tendency to isolation can only increase unhealthy practices like drug use and hatred spewed over internet channels. And certainly, face to face meetings are not always ideal, as they can be overtaken by uncivil groups seeking to cause disruption.

What encourages civility and neighborliness? Perhaps those casual meetings between neighbors, as well as small groupings of the like-minded can begin to overcome the processes that are pulling us apart.

Worth a try, at least. Better to carry out the old saying: “It’s better to light a candle than curse the darkness.”

Did Women Follow the Wrong Example?

The entry of women into the modern workforce did not in itself change our era. What changed was the kind of model they chose. They tended to follow the male model of the past few centuries.

Women have been part of the work force since the beginning of time. Women have worked on farms and in home-based shops for millennia. Regardless of discrimination, they formed an active part of a society’s economic life.

In addition, women did what men could not do but was essential to the survival of the human race. Though men were essential to the act of procreation, they had nothing to do with carrying a child or birthing it. Until the past century or so, the child’s very existence depended on feeding from the mother for its first few months or year of life.

On the other hand, in times past, fathers were less separated from their children in their growing-up years. Even when the men worked, the children were close by for whatever lessons their fathers wanted to give.

Though gender differences were acute, with men having privileged roles, they were at least present while their children grew up.

With the rise of the modern city and its division into city and suburb, women became less a part of economic life, and men became less involved with their children.

In the suburbs, out of the stream of economic activity, some women rebelled against what seemed to them a wasteland, a prison of sorts.

The advent of birth control, safer pregnancies and births, and bottle feeding, meant less attention to the childbearing and rearing role. All women, whether mothers or not, could find purpose beyond traditional roles.

But women still remain essential for continued life, in a way men do not.

Men can more easily leave their role of fatherhood and in some cases never even consider it. Physically, they are not tied to children as the mother is in pregnancy and birthing.

In the sixties, battles were fought over a woman’s worth to society and her right to a place in the job force, equal opportunity in management roles, and breaking the glass ceiling.

The word “house husband” was bandied around. Some men have indeed assumed a larger role in the family.

However, we gave little consideration to the modern separation of jobs and homes. The choice to have children or not to have children is quite proper. But for those who make a responsible decision to have children, the career deck is, more often than not, stacked against them.

Yes, child care can be made more affordable and available. But what about when a child is sick? Has special needs?

Or when a pandemic means the child cannot be in school or child care?

Ultimately, the parents are responsible, career or not.

Perhaps we should question the great separation of the past century or so between work and home.

Some separation is necessary, of course. We don’t wish a family living in a coal mining community to live in a coal mine. Nevertheless, the advent of the office job meant that many jobs were not in dangerous locations. Yet, we emptied families out of our cities for the suburbs and built super highways and faster cars and neglected mass transit.

Perhaps we should consider what happens when cities become childless.

Societies die without children. With children, but without responsible child rearing, societies crumble.

A society cannot function without responsible child rearing. For a vibrant society, children must be taken care of:  loved and listened to and provided proper food, health care, schooling, and housing. Society damages itself when it does not invest in the children and the parents who make its continued existence possible.

Taming Culture Wars

The supposed clash between different political groups in the United States has been described as a “culture war.” The painter and author Makoto Fujimura has described such a war “as a polarized mindset, viewing culture as territory to dominate rather than a common space Christians share with their neighbors.” (Quoted in “Defiant Joy,” Cosper, Mike; Christianity Today, December 2022)

In fact, we are all subject to human frailties and incompleteness. Jesus may be “the answer,” but none of us completely comprehends that answer, much less lives it. Thinking that we do, that people must see things the way we do is to choose the way the religious critics of Jesus did during his time on earth.

They ended up collaborating with the Romans to kill Jesus, just as too many people calling themselves Christians have taken part in religious wars to slaughter their “enemies.”

Perhaps we start with gratitude that God gives us the ability to think and ponder and observe and learn. We are each imperfect but with wonderful possibilities. We can look at those with whom we disagree as possibilities for our own learning.

We listen to them and converse and examine ideas. If they ask questions, we answer them with compassion and humility, grateful that we are talking, not fighting. We look to learn from them as well as share our own convictions.

Jesus spent much of his time in conversation with people, listening to them and answering their questions. People followed him because he attracted them and inspired them and gave them hope of a better way. They talked to him and listened to his answers and sometimes were changed. Surely, if we’re going to follow his example, we are called to that same way of interacting with the world.