Debate: Child Limits in America

By Glenn & Jake 

Children are the future...or are they? This is the question that philosophers and theologians have been pontificating on for centuries and yes no definitive answer exists, at least according to askjeeves.com. Some say that we should have a child limit like our red Chinese masters. Others feel that the current no-limit system is the cat's pajamas. And some just enjoy having careless, unprotected sex and making as many accidental babies as their sperm and ovaries can produce. Whichever group you fall in, you can be assured that this debate is for you. It offers two sides on the subject of child limits in the United States of America.

Glenn: I don't have children and I probably never will. I approach this issue from a theoretical perspective, like a non-Mormon sociologist. There is nothing outrageous with having three, four, five or even fifteen children. This country was founded on large families - Genghis Khan's family was (and is) larger than the entire county of Bhutan! Parents used to have tons of kids to work on a farm or in wage slavery urban factories supported by the modern Republican Party. These were all good reasons to have a big family, but modern times have produced modern reasons. We will discuss these as the debate continues, but one of the strongest is to emulate those we see on television. Our society is spiritually bankrupt (using the term "spiritually" in a completely non-theistic way) and we are forced to mimic behaviors we see in the media. The biggest shows on television in 2010 were all about having giant families. Jon and Kate Plus 8, 17 and Counting, and others display how couples can be if they keep having sex over and over again until the woman's uterus falls out. You already have your own football team assembled!

Jake: Here's my opening remark: fuck you, Glenn! Children are awful. Children are the cause and most of the casualties of wars. Hitler was a child at one point. Even your hero Genghis Khan was a child! Even having two children is kind of crazy, but if you are allowed to have one, you might as well have two--one of each. People are not responsible enough to take care of their children. If I were a parent, and hopefully I never will be, I would make sure my children would never watch the Beetlejuice cartoon or smoke crack. Parents have Beetlejuice babysit their children and then shotgun crack smoke into their mouths to watch them freak out. They think it is funny. The only thing that I find amusing about this all-too-real scenario is that this is what passes for good parenting these days. Now, I'm not saying we should put birth control and salt peter in the water supply, but I would not oppose a plan that did say that.

Glenn: That was a rude opening remark and if that is how you will raise your children, maybe you shouldn't have so many! But for the rest of us, have children. Have many children. You talk a lot of shit about children - some deserved - but you haven't addressed the main point, which is the number of children. For every evil person who was once a child - Hitler, Genghis Khan, Kate Gosselin - there exists a similarly good person who began as a teenager. If Andy Warhol's parents had twenty-five children instead of three, there would be much more art in this world. We are so thankful for all the Baldwin children and damn it if we wouldn't be better off with more. Every couple has to make the decision about how much they want to contribute to over-populating and killing the Earth, but I think there's nothing wrong with putting more and more CO-producing entities on this planet. Hong Kong has small families and a very low birth rate (~7.5). They have also been absorbed by China in the last twenty years. If you want us to keep having small families and be annexed by China, that's your right. But damn if I'm going to sit here and let it happen.

Jake: Two children is plenty. I did address it in my last point, but I will say it again: one boy, one girl or any other combination you choose via your genetics. We should be happy with that many. In the world of Aeon Flux, the full-length feature film, everybody is a clone. In the film Gattaca, you cannot become an astronaut if you have bad genes, or whatever that movie is about. I feel like it is vaguely about population control, but I could be wrong, and if I am, strike that point about Gattaca. Children are terrible. My dad has seven children and he keeps having more. That is crazy, isn't it? Think about all of the food he has to buy to feed his four babies right now. Now think of that food going into your mouth for free. Which world do you want to live in? We are running out of space and pretty soon we'll be living in 500 story high-rise apartments like in Neo-Tokyo.

Glenn: I think we have our next debate: Hong Kong or Tokyo. But before then, we have to finish this one. Your dad has seven children but you love all of them (except yourself). There are so many awful right-wing people in this country, due in part to highly religious families procreation practices. If we want to prevent the United States from becoming a Mormon theocracy, we have to match their birthrates. Good, hard-working liberal Americans like myself should feel compelled to create as many similarly minded children as possible. When the upcoming ideological civil war tears this country apart, we want enough people on our side to make it a fair fight. I'm not Peter King so I don't hate Muslims, but many Europeans do. They hate them because their population is growing so quickly and they make up a bigger and bigger portion of countries such as Germany, France and Turkey. If some families decide to turn on the uterine spigot and some families don't, the former will be the ones who demographically dominate the next generation. Personally, I welcome the new Hispanic majority that will seize power in the US by 2040 - in fact, I'm even re-learning Spanish in honor of it - but let's not pretend like family size has nothing to do with it.

Jake: Glenn's racially charged point has done nothing to convince me that it should be mandatory to have over two children. I am worried about spacial issues, not racial issues. The only race I'm concerned with is the Kentucky Derby and that's because I bet $800 on Comma to the Top. I think I have a strong chance of winning, but I also think that America is quickly running out of room in the states people actually want to live in. Sure, there is plenty of room in the country and Wyoming, but we need to be able to farm vegetables, fruits, livestock and sand. Without any of those our economy would collapse like a house of cards in a wind tunnel. Glenn's hatred of Mormons is matched only by his love of large families. I find his opinion on both to be repulsive. Now, I may have at times said in jest that I think abortions should be mandatory and that mother's should give birth directly into meat grinders, but now I am saying it seriously. I want my country back, and unlike Glenn, not from the Muslims and Mormons, but from the children who do nothing but play Space Invaders, have sex, graffito tag everything in sight and steal and murder everything and everybody in sight. As Thomas Jefferson once said: "If children are the future, then somebody better build a time machine so I can hang out in the past."