I Think We've Grown

I read a story in Guideposts today which inspired this article.  I think I'm in a unique position to write it, because of the number of decades I have lived and what I know about changes in our society.  I've also known people wounded by the old ways we handled things and those encouraged and helped by the new.


This story I read was somewhat typical of ones you hear or see from children given up for adoption or from the parents who made the decision to let them go.  I think we Americans have grown a lot in my lifetime and that it has left us a more loving and compassionate people.  I like to think that the Almighty and Jesus smile down upon us for this change.


I was born in 1938, a rather innocent and naïve time.  I grew up in a mostly Christian neighborhood in a small city in Illinois.  When World War II was finally over, we began to live our lives without the loneliness of our men being gone or the grief of yet another death of our military men.


Prior to the start of the war, I don't think very many people engaged in unmarried sex.  But then I may be the most naïve.  Women seemed to become less reserved as they knew the war was going to separate them and they might never see each other again.  Where there is sex, there will be babies sometimes. People clung to each other and some wanted the children that might be the last tie they had to the man they loved.


After the war, we returned to the uptight, anal retentive, judgment making people we had been before the war.  Maybe, the no no's about sex were even more severe.  And, God forbid, anyone should get pregnant.  There are tales of shotgun weddings and stories of young men who refused to face their responsibilities.


As far as I know, no girls in my neighborhood faced an unwanted pregnancy.  A friend some distance away "fell in love" and found herself facing a mountain of trouble.  Her family handled it in what was probably the worst possible way.  They forced her to get an illegal abortion and forced the couple into a shotgun wedding as well.  You know how long that marriage lasted!  I ran into the girl some years later after I had gone away to school.  Not knowing that I had run into a nurse with questionable integrity and a flapping mouth, she told me she had ruined her life  --  but she didn't tell me why she felt that or what she had done to cause it.  My heart still aches for her and for my inadequacy in dealing with the situation.


Television shows have shown the horror of parents, who in their own fear and unwarranted shame over "sex" and it's inevitable results (a beautiful little baby) have acted like monsters.  Such parents shamed the young people, especially the girl.  They sent her off  to seclusion where caring (and sometimes evil) people tended them until the birth and then the parents and the staff forced the girls to give those babies away to loving and "well-to-do" couples who couldn't have children of their own.  Oh, would that this had always been true. Some women decided on their own to let the children go to supposedly better lives.


These approaches have left generations of women searching for their babies, and even children who found good adoptive parents, wishing and searching for their natural moms.  And these poor kids have a hole in their psyches from which we can almost hear the scream  --  why couldn't you love us enough to keep us?  How could you cast us away?


I won't duke it out with anybody whether the sexual revolution is good or bad, acceptable or evil.  But I will attempt to describe a good side effect of it.  Girls now get to keep their love children if they want.  Parents don't have to become ogres who rip new babies from their baby's arms.  Hospital personnel willingly list the birth father's name right along with the mother's.  If the couple is compatible, they make a nest together and take their babies home.  Families are inclined to encircle the young couple with love and support.  Proud grandparents engage in their justifiable bragging rights.


Babies are a gift from God as the saying goes.  And a marvelous gift one is.


I think this shows we have grown.

You Can't Fix Stupid

The title of this article is one of my baby brother's favorite expressions.  Often all we have to do is walk outside the door and say good morning to someone to find out why such a remark is so descriptive of life.


What gets under my skin, ad nauseam, is how people with such controversial jobs as those at Planned Parenthood could be "stupid" enough to say anything that could be used against the program, whether in or out of context.


Planned Parenthood, even if one abhors abortion, has a lot of value in society.  It teaches, duh, planning pregnancies instead of having them by accident.  It provides the sex education where needed.  It helps young people cope with serious life issues.


Now, because individuals have sat around talking about crunching baby heads and buying expensive cars, our aggressively moralistic, conservative base has more fuel to fan the flames.  Our young people could be without needed counseling.  And medicine could potentially lose a valuable resource for determining how to fix our serious ailments.


And where are the morals of the people who sucker punched these individuals?  They have none!  All they have is an obsession and a faulty understanding of what God's mind really is.  None of us know God's mind in this day and age.  It's not just pastors who have lost touch with the Almighty.  An obsession is a mental illness, not a righteous calling.  Let's call it what it is.