A Christmas Story: Nature vs. What?

The historical dilemma has been nature vs. nurture, i.e., whether your genes or your environment have shaped you into the magnificent creature that you are today. Unfortunately, the nurture part of the equation has changed dramatically. It’s value has been eroding thanks to the heartless leftists and self-absorbed feminists who want a soul-less State to raise children and who propagandize that all women are in bondage of some sort or the other, especially as concerns raising children. Only by denigrating the value of parenting and thus childhood do these people feel whole. After all, if one can wrest control of children from their parents, then absolute power is that much closer for those who think that to value parenthood and religion belongs to ‘lessor’ people. So the dilemma is no longer nature vs. nurture, but nature vs. non-nurture. The me-first 60’s generation found children to be good sources for social experimentation—communal living, multiple parents, suspect diets, open sexuality, etc. The non-nurtured offspring of the 60’s generation have gone one step further and found children to be a burden—annoying, time-intensive, lifestyle killers or status enhancers (similar to a $1,000 designer handbag) or an item to be given to others. Here’s a true story to illustrate the demise of nurturing and the rise of non-nurturing. A well-off, late 40’s-something woman (raised not by wolves, but in the 1960’s at Brown University) thought she might be pregnant. She already had one child. She reasoned thusly: I already have one child, and my husband and I don’t really want another kid, but our neighbors would like a child, so if I’m pregnant, we’ll give the kid to them. This woman showed no emotion as she said this. She could have been giving the lawn mower to her neighbors by the manner in which she was speaking. The stunned listeners to this tale gingerly pointed out to this emotionally pathetic woman that she and her husband would have their own child living next door to them, that the child might look like them, that sooner or later the neighbors would have to tell the child that he/she was adopted and who his/her real parents were, that their first child and the child who was passed off to the neighbors would someday learn that they are siblings and had been denied that relationship, that the adopted child would learn that his real parents—who had the money and time to love him/her—chose to discard him/her like a duplicate gift that they didn’t need. Well, it suddenly dawned on this hyper-indoctrinated offspring of socialism and rabid feminism just how heartless this all sounded to the people listening. She said, “Aw my gawd, you make it sound like I’m some sort of monster.” Wrong again, dearie. We didn’t make you sound that way. YOU chose to sound that way. While the listeners had been glad not to have heard the A-word in her story, everyone was appalled that this is what women have come to—the inability to move into adult responsibilities when faced with becoming the great Mother image that untold numbers of women have carried and added to throughout history. The eternal lessons of motherhood extend far beyond mere reproduction, though the supposed intellectuals of the Left never elaborate on this side of femininity, preferring the emotionally and spiritually void thinking of ‘now you’re pregnant, now you’re not.’ Thanks goodness such bankruptcy of thought was not around over 2000 years ago, when a man named Joseph accepted his responsibilities as husband and father, and a poor Middle Eastern girl named Mary accepted her nature, her femaleness, her impending motherhood--and gave birth to and loved a baby named Jesus.