« The new impermanence (slow return) | Main | The unfairness of things, revived: Charlie Rich »

The minority position (a series of digressions)

An oddly timed and curiously sourced Washington Post story circulating in today's newspaper reports that the traditional American family -- married with children at home -- is becoming an educated, elite minority of 25 percent of the population. "The culture is shifting, and marriage has almost become a luxury item, one that only the well-educated and well-paid are interested in," says Isabel V. Sawhill, an expert on marriage and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute. This appears in the same issue of the Lexington Herald reporting a bitter legislative contest seeking to outlaw state-funded domestic partnership benefits as part of the ongoing movement to protect marriage.

Now, I can't quite figure out what the news hook to the Post story is; surely this isn't another layer of data from the 2000 census coming to light, is it?. And my instinct is to be suspicious of the number, given the constant stream of reports commenting on (and seeking to profit from: "Inagodawfuldavita" as a financial planning soundtrack?) the graying of America's baby boom. And, of course, marriage is a legal matter, the absence of which hardly proves the absence of a committed long-term relationship.

(Speaking of which, I can't figure out why anybody would wish to deny love and happiness to another human being. Really, how are you harmed by gay marriage, by gay people raising children? And by what possible right in a free society do you seek to impose your religious views on those who do not share them? Or is our health care crisis so insolvable that we must invent reasons to keep people from seeing the doctor?)

(And don't tell me the children are harmed by gay marriage. That is a vile and baseless argument, no better than those laid against mixed-race marriages a generation or two back.)

Years of long experience and self-examination have inured me to the perils of holding minority positions in this society, but I must confess that it never occurred to me that being a married parent would mark me as a member of a minority, much less an elite minority.

We have a funny relationship to education in this country. Most people don't really enjoy the experience of being taught, one of my pet theories says, and that, in part, is why we are so reluctant to properly fund our public schools, no matter how often we complain that they don't measure up to programs in Europe and/or Japan. And clearly the current administration distrusts deep learning and nuance, or is so bent on hurtling us all toward an apocalpytic climax that it doesn't care.

Both sides seem so weary of the fight that they embrace scenarios leading to the collapse of civilization as we know it, whether it be through our moral failure or through the destruction of our planet's fragile ecology and the consumption of every last natural resource. I just ran onto a magazine called byFaith published by the Presbyterian Church in America (and I'm particularly ill-suited to parse the nuances of church affiliations, so I've no idea whether this is a mainstream organ or not) which summarized a membership survey, including a curious line: "most respondents think that the science of global warming is unsettled" and therefore, if I follow correctly, oppose their church taking a role in what is (hopefully) a growing movement called "creation stewardship."

And, no, I'm not working toward a conclusion here.

I am simply confused.

Global warming as a religious issue, tied up somehow in the theology of intelligent design and the morality of exclusion...I don't get it. Were we not given brains to use? If there is a god who...dabbles in human affairs, say...can any religious community look upon itself and its works and imagine that god would be pleased?

The election of Ronald Reagan in 1979 confused me, and I have spent a great deal of my adult life trying somehow to figure out how this country works, how it thinks, why it makes the choices it does. I am no closer now to understanding than I was then. Sometimes it seems as if music -- that belabored universal language, now segmented into discrete user groups -- offers a kind of key, a cross-cultural glimpse into another living room. But now it doesn't.

The phrase "educated elite" keeps resonating this morning. We don't trust education. We don't trust knowledge. The long tradition of the common man (and, at least post-World War II, of the common woman) seems somehow to repudiate the insights of education, though the founders of this country were so clearly an educated elite. Now the phrase is too often meant as a kind of slur. We are drawn to the kind of certainty which one can have only when matters are simple and uncluttered by conflicting facts and ideas.

And I am cluttered. Lord knows I'm cluttered. Time to put another CD on, and hope for the best.

Posted by grant on March 7, 2007 8:39 AM | Permalink

TrackBack