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From: segs@mhuxv.UUCP (slusky)
Newsgroups: net.religion.jewish
Subject: Re: Re: Old guard Princeton alumnus speaks his old-guard mind
Message-ID: <197@mhuxv.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 15-Nov-84 09:06:39 EST
Article-I.D.: mhuxv.197
Posted: Thu Nov 15 09:06:39 1984
Date-Received: Fri, 16-Nov-84 05:09:03 EST
References: <251@mhuxm.UUCP> <5580@brl-tgr.ARPA> <194@mhuxv.UUCP>
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I'm posting this as a favor to Ken Wolman (whuxe!ktw).

From: KEN WOLMAN
      Bell Communications Research
      Livingston, NJ
      whuxe!ktw

Subject: The Intelligent Man's Guide to Selfishness,
	 aka, Real Princeton Men Don't Have Children
*************************************************************
> ... It is an intelligent decision to NOT have children. ...
> 
> Will Martin
> 
>... Do you agree that it is an intelligent decision NOT
> to have children? And conversely, a stupid decision to have them? ...
> 
> 				Susan Slusky

Will someone answer Mr. Martin?  Indeed.  

I assume, first of all, Mr. Martin, that since you posted your
original comment to net.religion.jewish, you are either a Jew
or someone looking for a fight without regard for race, religion,
or country of origin.  I assume, secondly, and with perhaps even
more justification, that you are a seriously underdeveloped
man emotionally, and have a need to broadcast a private decision
as though it were public business.

Many people, Mr. Martin, choose childlessness.  I don't care for
their decision religiously or humanly (or is there any difference?),
but I can respect it.  What I cannot respect is a person who 
publicizes an essentially private matter in such a way as to make
individuals with children seem foolish by comparison.  

Perhaps you have a problem with children, Mr. Martin.  Many of us
do, even those of us who--like me, my wife, and the marriage that
is more than the sum of the two of us--have willingly brought them
into a world many of whose residents seem to share your view.

Children are expensive.  Children are often ill-mannered, loud,
contentious, violence-prone, and disrespectful.  (So, for that
matter, are many adults.)  Children are a source of worry:
endless, constant.  Before our first child was born, my mother-in-
law (one of the wisest people I know) told us we would probably
never again get a totally restful night's sleep, and that one
ear would be tuned--however subliminally--for crying in the
night.  We would worry for and about our kids even when they are
grown and we are old.  

It's a bad situation, having kids.  They grow up and face all kinds
of terrible things: increasingly the threat of war; of a lowered
standard of living; even more immediately, of a world populated
by men and women with your attitudes toward them.  The last is
perhaps the worst threat of all.  Why?  Because it tells us more
about our "civilization and its discontents" than any threat of
thermonuclear war, of oppression, of starvation.  It gives us a
key to the attitudes that make such plagues possible; for it 
shows us the shrinking soul of post-modern men and women, the
emptiness that lies inside the heart.

Engendering and raising children is a mitzvah in the Jewish
tradition, as Ms. Slusky points out above.  A mitzvah in this
context is something that is commanded BECAUSE it is life-
nourishing and enriching for all parties.  Children are God's
lessons to us, His mirror of our own souls.  They show us ourselves
when young; they give us the opportunity to glimpse the innocence
we have lost but can nurture in our children if only we can
recognize it.  Our children teach us guilelessness and the
beauty that our ancestors must have experienced in Gan Eden.

I'm sorry you can't see that.  Your choice is your choice, and
is between you and the woman who is or becomes your wife.  But
our choice, to bring children into this world, is not 
unintelligent.  Indeed, it TRANSCENDS intelligence as defined by
Princeton, psychometry, or cynicism.  It is precisely in this
tenuous and endangered world that bearing and raising children
is an act not merely of love between a man and a woman, but
also of death-defiance and affirmation that life can and must
continue.  

Ken Wolman
whuxe!ktw
(201) 740-4565
-- 
mhuxv!segs