Having had a very much wanted and planned-for child, I'm exquisitely aware of the knowledge of a growing life inside my own body. I remain grateful these three decades later that I was spared any need to consider what would have been for me personally a terrible and likely unbearable (irony of la…
Having had a very much wanted and planned-for child, I'm exquisitely aware of the knowledge of a growing life inside my own body. I remain grateful these three decades later that I was spared any need to consider what would have been for me personally a terrible and likely unbearable (irony of language!) choice.
And as a mother I feel really savage contempt towards women who take that choice carelessly. But it's not my business or society's.
I'm not in the least troubled by the eugenics aspect, or by sex-selection. Both horrible in their ways but each is still the woman's choice. I recognize that when it comes to sex-selection a woman is often, in other cultures and perhaps even here, compelled by the impregnator or his wretched family or perhaps even hers to abort a healthy child. But a bankruptcy of morals in a society can be expressed in a gazillion ways; that's just one.
After I stopped working full-time in respectable employment, I was a tour guide for awhile in a children's farm/petting zoo, and many of the groups visiting comprised severely handicapped children and adults. For the most profoundly handicapped their life was no blessing to anyone. Just horrible suffering and the destruction of the parents too, and so often of course it was the mother alone left to lift that burden every moment of her life, and to contemplate what would happen if her child survived her.
No society can survive if a significant portion of its people essentially require warehousing, regardless of how fancy we make the warehouse. And I know the agony of a very beloved friend who struggled all her now-middle-aged-son's life to get him into safe, appropriate, well-run permanent such warehousing. The constant struggle to ensure the govt. fulfilled its responsibility and the caregivers gave good care. You can't pay anyone enough to love your child and for those without means, the govt. ain't gonna pay 'em enough fer damned sure.
I really recoil with disgust when I hear the families of profoundly handicapped children talk about the wonderful "gift" and "blessing" they've been given. A suffering human being is not an instrument of someone else's personal redemption and fulfillment. There will inevitably come that time when the burden is spread quite widely.
But a living born child regardless of handicap must be cared for with the very best we can provide and we must fight that it should be provided. But everyone knows it's often not well-cared for at all. Every day--every single fucking day--I read of another handicapped toddler murdered by its mother or the mother's boyfriend or the grandmother, etc. etc. A short life that endured the unspeakable during those few years, and it happens over, and over, and over. Absolutely that poor baby would have been exponentially better served to have been aborted before viability, and its soul, if one believes in such, returned to the vast cosmic ocean of eternal infinity.
Good answer too, because it's honest. Most people squirm instead of taking a stand.
The line of resoning about the handicapped being a burden in various ways, is one of the ways the whole eugenics thing got started in the 19th century. The other one was financial/elitist, breeding the perfect human and other modernisms.
It was called a mercy, and generally thought of as such. Same with enforced sterilisation and abortion.
Having been born in a nation which practiced eugenic policy at the time (until the mid-1970s actually), and having had students which would have been aborted or euthanised or sterilised had they been my age, I take a different view.
That view is I compare what we spend on pedophiles, murderers, rapists, terorrists, heroin-dealers and so on. The cost per prisoner is about $250/day on average. The welfare-check for a handicapped person is about $850/month.
Why does some people, especially politicians, think a serial rapist is worth more than a disabled child?
But I also acknowledge that modern medicine has interfered with the natural eugenics process, too. It's one thing to repair an infant's heart so it can live a close to normal life. It's another thing to keep alive, through extraordinary constant means, a child who can have no independent life ever.
My friend who finally got her severely autistic son into a group home in the UK, that seemed to be a really nice place, with his own attractive room and pleasant grounds etc. etc., nevertheless had to be vigilant unceasingly to make sure he was well cared for. They housed a vew quite violent people who really needed one-on-one caregiving along with gentle, easily-distressed residents; they had some extremely negligent caregivers who only became more resentful when my friend reported problems; the local responsible council was always having investigations and conclusions and recommendations and changes in the home's leadership and then rinse and repeat endlessly.
And my friend, who is a single mother and has had increasingly poor health for decades until the vax completely blew up her life, doesn't have even the physical resources to do this level of oversight anymore. She has family but they have their own families that need their attention too.
And I can tell you her anguish in contemplating what will happen if he survives her is something no one should have to live with.
If you read the news in the US, every day, in addition to the kids murdered by their parents, are the daycares and schools--licensed, registered, under state legal mandates, etc. etc. etc., who keep abusing even "normal" children and it's only when someone looks into the surveillance tapes, eventually, that one sees what's been happening. A nonverbal child or adult with profound needs, and often unfortunately extremely unappealing, in diapers but weighing what a large adult man weighs--you think they are cared for tenderly? My God. When I saw how caregivers treated some of the children and adults visiting that children's farm, right out in the open in front of thousands, I can't even imagine what happens on the night shift back at the institution.
You find me the guarantee that we can protect each and every one of these most vulnerable,, every moment, from birth to a natural and comforted death, I'm with you.
Oh, I have seen the ugly side of caretaking - with the best altruistic and noble intents - from the inside, believe you me. Autistic students, albeit high-end cognitive-wise, was my specialty. Downsized staff replaced with medication, mixing and matching of people with all kinds of disorders, what staff is hired is done so along the "you'll have to take what you can get"-attitude, malnutrition, abuse and so on. I will not share actual examples, as I'm still under confidentiality (our rues for that has no date of expiry), but I can say this: if Sweden was to go back to massive institutionalisation (which we had until the early 1990s), complete with sterilisation and abortions, the protests would be loud but token and short-lived. Knowing this has led me to ponder the following (for some 20-odd years):
For some humans, it's as if (mental) handicaps triggers an inner sadist - as if the state of being handicapped somehow validates and justifies abuse. A friend of mine described it as a reflex reaction (which he hated to experience). Perhaps experiencing an emotion one is conditioned to reject as evil without any tool or path for disassembling and understanding it, is what triggers some humans to become cruel to some kinds of weakness?
I believe Arendt covered an aspect of this in her books about the Holocaust, that some of the camp staff hated the prisoners not due to their race or other, but because they were "wwak" and that very weakness was what forced the staff to be cruel to them - some kind of vicious double-helix of emotional reactions and abuse, if I'm putting the words right.
There's a primitive satisfaction in making someone else cry. Most of us learn to control it. I remember my 8 and 10 and perhaps 12-yr old self, making my brother cry with scary stories, and my cousin cry when I kept saying [grandma] was dead, because in my family we used the same Yiddish word for my great-grandma that she used for her maternal grandma. I wasn't confused, I was being deliberately mean.
Why? I can blame it, I guess, on having an alcoholic father who beat me with a belt and this was my lancing-the-boil mechanism, and I was low on the social-status ladder in school and in the neighborhood so this was the only place I could in turn inflict pain.
Or I was just a shit and learned, later, it was a bad way to be. Who knows?
As kids we act like the little sadists kids are, and (ideally) get told off in such a way we feel shame, and also (when the cying stops) get it explained to us why and how what we did was wrong.
The old saw of "do as I say, not as I do" have some merit, even if the original meaning has been debased into referring to hypocrisy and not the simple fact that an adult has so much more experience and intellect than a child, that any real in-depth explanation (especially in a heated moment or an emergency) becomes unresaonable or gobbledygook.
We often carry with us the exact turning point, when we started to develop a moral sense on our own. Some examples of when that doesn't work:
Sociopaths can't, it's the main thing making them a problem.
Kids that instead are taught norms that run counter to society (say moslem kids in a western nation being told hating and abusing jews is a sacred duty) cannot be reached by the shaming mechanism.
Pedophiles after their first episode of abuse can no longer be helped; they will always commit further abuses because there is no going back for them, and the shaming-mechaism has been subjugated by rationalisation instead.
Autistics have stunted socialisation ability and development; the low-functioning often withdraws and the high-functioning becomes arrigant and dismissive of what they see as play-acting, while still experiencing emotion, sham and guilt but without the practice needed to handle/process them correctly. Which is why there's tragically often an overlap between HFA's, psychosis and schizophrenia. But I digress.
What you demontrate is what the greeks taught: Gnothi Seauton, know yourself. That is rare.
Thank you, that is very generous (is that the right expression?) of you. Though in all honesty, if no-one shared or asked, there'd be no-start for my train of thought, would it?
It's been a journey, true indeed, for many of us who for one reason or a thosuand somewhere, somewhen decided to stop, stand and say: "No more. I will not do violence to myself, my mind, my soul anymore."
I still remember many of the revelatory moments I've had (slow learner...). Sitting on a ledge looking down on my droogs and realising it's rehab-yoyo, prison-pinball, the grave or shape up. And it's on me. And half a minute after that thought hits me like a steel-toed boot to the nads, I meet my wife. She worried about the walking skeleton sitting on a ledge like some biker-jacket sporting gargoyle.
The rest is history as they say.
See you in the stacks, 'cause it's dinnertime here now.
I find that the exchange of ideas here in the comments threads brings out the best discourse, and is why I don't even think of expressing the fertility of my mind in essays anywhere else. It's the living waters one needs for fruitfulness.
I appreciate very much what you say here.
Having had a very much wanted and planned-for child, I'm exquisitely aware of the knowledge of a growing life inside my own body. I remain grateful these three decades later that I was spared any need to consider what would have been for me personally a terrible and likely unbearable (irony of language!) choice.
And as a mother I feel really savage contempt towards women who take that choice carelessly. But it's not my business or society's.
I'm not in the least troubled by the eugenics aspect, or by sex-selection. Both horrible in their ways but each is still the woman's choice. I recognize that when it comes to sex-selection a woman is often, in other cultures and perhaps even here, compelled by the impregnator or his wretched family or perhaps even hers to abort a healthy child. But a bankruptcy of morals in a society can be expressed in a gazillion ways; that's just one.
After I stopped working full-time in respectable employment, I was a tour guide for awhile in a children's farm/petting zoo, and many of the groups visiting comprised severely handicapped children and adults. For the most profoundly handicapped their life was no blessing to anyone. Just horrible suffering and the destruction of the parents too, and so often of course it was the mother alone left to lift that burden every moment of her life, and to contemplate what would happen if her child survived her.
No society can survive if a significant portion of its people essentially require warehousing, regardless of how fancy we make the warehouse. And I know the agony of a very beloved friend who struggled all her now-middle-aged-son's life to get him into safe, appropriate, well-run permanent such warehousing. The constant struggle to ensure the govt. fulfilled its responsibility and the caregivers gave good care. You can't pay anyone enough to love your child and for those without means, the govt. ain't gonna pay 'em enough fer damned sure.
I really recoil with disgust when I hear the families of profoundly handicapped children talk about the wonderful "gift" and "blessing" they've been given. A suffering human being is not an instrument of someone else's personal redemption and fulfillment. There will inevitably come that time when the burden is spread quite widely.
But a living born child regardless of handicap must be cared for with the very best we can provide and we must fight that it should be provided. But everyone knows it's often not well-cared for at all. Every day--every single fucking day--I read of another handicapped toddler murdered by its mother or the mother's boyfriend or the grandmother, etc. etc. A short life that endured the unspeakable during those few years, and it happens over, and over, and over. Absolutely that poor baby would have been exponentially better served to have been aborted before viability, and its soul, if one believes in such, returned to the vast cosmic ocean of eternal infinity.
Good answer too, because it's honest. Most people squirm instead of taking a stand.
The line of resoning about the handicapped being a burden in various ways, is one of the ways the whole eugenics thing got started in the 19th century. The other one was financial/elitist, breeding the perfect human and other modernisms.
It was called a mercy, and generally thought of as such. Same with enforced sterilisation and abortion.
Having been born in a nation which practiced eugenic policy at the time (until the mid-1970s actually), and having had students which would have been aborted or euthanised or sterilised had they been my age, I take a different view.
That view is I compare what we spend on pedophiles, murderers, rapists, terorrists, heroin-dealers and so on. The cost per prisoner is about $250/day on average. The welfare-check for a handicapped person is about $850/month.
Why does some people, especially politicians, think a serial rapist is worth more than a disabled child?
I agree with your evaluation of comparable worth.
But I also acknowledge that modern medicine has interfered with the natural eugenics process, too. It's one thing to repair an infant's heart so it can live a close to normal life. It's another thing to keep alive, through extraordinary constant means, a child who can have no independent life ever.
My friend who finally got her severely autistic son into a group home in the UK, that seemed to be a really nice place, with his own attractive room and pleasant grounds etc. etc., nevertheless had to be vigilant unceasingly to make sure he was well cared for. They housed a vew quite violent people who really needed one-on-one caregiving along with gentle, easily-distressed residents; they had some extremely negligent caregivers who only became more resentful when my friend reported problems; the local responsible council was always having investigations and conclusions and recommendations and changes in the home's leadership and then rinse and repeat endlessly.
And my friend, who is a single mother and has had increasingly poor health for decades until the vax completely blew up her life, doesn't have even the physical resources to do this level of oversight anymore. She has family but they have their own families that need their attention too.
And I can tell you her anguish in contemplating what will happen if he survives her is something no one should have to live with.
If you read the news in the US, every day, in addition to the kids murdered by their parents, are the daycares and schools--licensed, registered, under state legal mandates, etc. etc. etc., who keep abusing even "normal" children and it's only when someone looks into the surveillance tapes, eventually, that one sees what's been happening. A nonverbal child or adult with profound needs, and often unfortunately extremely unappealing, in diapers but weighing what a large adult man weighs--you think they are cared for tenderly? My God. When I saw how caregivers treated some of the children and adults visiting that children's farm, right out in the open in front of thousands, I can't even imagine what happens on the night shift back at the institution.
You find me the guarantee that we can protect each and every one of these most vulnerable,, every moment, from birth to a natural and comforted death, I'm with you.
Oh, I have seen the ugly side of caretaking - with the best altruistic and noble intents - from the inside, believe you me. Autistic students, albeit high-end cognitive-wise, was my specialty. Downsized staff replaced with medication, mixing and matching of people with all kinds of disorders, what staff is hired is done so along the "you'll have to take what you can get"-attitude, malnutrition, abuse and so on. I will not share actual examples, as I'm still under confidentiality (our rues for that has no date of expiry), but I can say this: if Sweden was to go back to massive institutionalisation (which we had until the early 1990s), complete with sterilisation and abortions, the protests would be loud but token and short-lived. Knowing this has led me to ponder the following (for some 20-odd years):
For some humans, it's as if (mental) handicaps triggers an inner sadist - as if the state of being handicapped somehow validates and justifies abuse. A friend of mine described it as a reflex reaction (which he hated to experience). Perhaps experiencing an emotion one is conditioned to reject as evil without any tool or path for disassembling and understanding it, is what triggers some humans to become cruel to some kinds of weakness?
I believe Arendt covered an aspect of this in her books about the Holocaust, that some of the camp staff hated the prisoners not due to their race or other, but because they were "wwak" and that very weakness was what forced the staff to be cruel to them - some kind of vicious double-helix of emotional reactions and abuse, if I'm putting the words right.
There's a primitive satisfaction in making someone else cry. Most of us learn to control it. I remember my 8 and 10 and perhaps 12-yr old self, making my brother cry with scary stories, and my cousin cry when I kept saying [grandma] was dead, because in my family we used the same Yiddish word for my great-grandma that she used for her maternal grandma. I wasn't confused, I was being deliberately mean.
Why? I can blame it, I guess, on having an alcoholic father who beat me with a belt and this was my lancing-the-boil mechanism, and I was low on the social-status ladder in school and in the neighborhood so this was the only place I could in turn inflict pain.
Or I was just a shit and learned, later, it was a bad way to be. Who knows?
As kids we act like the little sadists kids are, and (ideally) get told off in such a way we feel shame, and also (when the cying stops) get it explained to us why and how what we did was wrong.
The old saw of "do as I say, not as I do" have some merit, even if the original meaning has been debased into referring to hypocrisy and not the simple fact that an adult has so much more experience and intellect than a child, that any real in-depth explanation (especially in a heated moment or an emergency) becomes unresaonable or gobbledygook.
We often carry with us the exact turning point, when we started to develop a moral sense on our own. Some examples of when that doesn't work:
Sociopaths can't, it's the main thing making them a problem.
Kids that instead are taught norms that run counter to society (say moslem kids in a western nation being told hating and abusing jews is a sacred duty) cannot be reached by the shaming mechanism.
Pedophiles after their first episode of abuse can no longer be helped; they will always commit further abuses because there is no going back for them, and the shaming-mechaism has been subjugated by rationalisation instead.
Autistics have stunted socialisation ability and development; the low-functioning often withdraws and the high-functioning becomes arrigant and dismissive of what they see as play-acting, while still experiencing emotion, sham and guilt but without the practice needed to handle/process them correctly. Which is why there's tragically often an overlap between HFA's, psychosis and schizophrenia. But I digress.
What you demontrate is what the greeks taught: Gnothi Seauton, know yourself. That is rare.
It's been a hard journey getting here.
And I would say you're the best explainer of these things I've ever encountered, anywhere.
Thank you, that is very generous (is that the right expression?) of you. Though in all honesty, if no-one shared or asked, there'd be no-start for my train of thought, would it?
It's been a journey, true indeed, for many of us who for one reason or a thosuand somewhere, somewhen decided to stop, stand and say: "No more. I will not do violence to myself, my mind, my soul anymore."
I still remember many of the revelatory moments I've had (slow learner...). Sitting on a ledge looking down on my droogs and realising it's rehab-yoyo, prison-pinball, the grave or shape up. And it's on me. And half a minute after that thought hits me like a steel-toed boot to the nads, I meet my wife. She worried about the walking skeleton sitting on a ledge like some biker-jacket sporting gargoyle.
The rest is history as they say.
See you in the stacks, 'cause it's dinnertime here now.
I find that the exchange of ideas here in the comments threads brings out the best discourse, and is why I don't even think of expressing the fertility of my mind in essays anywhere else. It's the living waters one needs for fruitfulness.